Inauguration 'Ama' and 'Karnawal' dazzle at the start of the Malaga Festival
Winner Agustí Villaronga: "Cinema is something else. Before lamenting, you have to adapt"
Surprise 'Brave flash' bursts like a gale in Malaga to turn everything upside down
The edition of the Malaga Festival that ends is, in reality, the one that begins. You know, the pandemic. And the record that the jury
chaired by actress Nora Navas
announced at noon on Saturday
can boast, in fair correspondence, of principle and, without offending, of end; youth and seniority; of the new and the old; unanimously without a doubt. The most evident thing was his clarity when he gave almost everything to '
El viente del mar', by
the well-established and classic Agustí Villaronga manners. For her it was the major prize or Biznaga de Oro; that of director; the one with the script (signed by the Italian
Alessandro Baricco,
from whose novel the text arises, and by Villaronga himself); photography by Josep María Civil and Blai Tomàs; that of the music composed by Marcús JGR, and that of the best main actor played by Roger Casamajor. A unanimity to the Bulgarian, who would say the classic.
At his side, the great surprise of the festival for what it proposes, for what it invents and for what it also breaks, '
Destello bravío
' by
Ainhoa Rodríguez,
won the second prize in importance, that of the Jury and that of the montage of José Luis Picado. And so, one film next to another, they recompose in their own way, as we said, a beginning that is an end and vice versa.
The two boards were thus made with eight of the 11 possible awards.
That the two tapes are distributed by
Filmin
also counts as a symptom. Rare and new times in which all the daring and desire are on account of a '
streaming
'
platform
that not of the others (the others are beginning to be and those who used to be the ones).
The choice seems fair, although perhaps so much hyperbole about. In any case and if to the two films we add the mention of '
Ama
', Júlia de Paz Solvas, in her visceral and clear actress Tamara Casellas, and '
Karnawal
', by Juan Pablo Félix, as the other Biznaga de Oro, the one of the Ibero-American cinema; then, yes you can say that they are all are. La del Argentino is an exhibition by the actors Alfredo Castro (award for best secondary) and Martín López Lacci who turn their respective performances into
two careful exhibitions of silence.
It matters not so much what is seen or heard as everything that guilt, shame or desire is silent. There wasn't much else in the official section.
And that is good news for the record and not so much for the Malaga Festival as a
whole. That the prizes are too much above what is seen as a whole is fulfilled.
The Villaronga thing could be described as a rebirth. Or reinvention. The director of not so hidden classics like 'Behind the glass' or 'Aro Tolbukihn' decided not so long ago to get lost in a kind of mega-production so random with unreal. 'Born King', his previous film, navigated in a confusing way between cheap epic cinema (a contradiction) and expensive propaganda cinema (yet another paradox). Now, against everyone and only in favor of the passion for cinema itself, the director invents a prodigy almost completely alone and halfway through almost everything: between cruelty and lyricism, between theater and cinema, between the need to roll and the inability to do so due to the pandemic.
The film uses Alessandro Baricco's text
'Ocean sea
', which in turn navigates in one of its sections through Théodore Géricault's painting '
The Raft of Medusa
'.
'El viente del mar
' is thus
a game of double, or triple reference,
which makes three narrative threads coincide between the desolate past, the wounded present and the impossible future.
It is cinema that feeds on a theatrical staging with the same ease that it investigates the primary and pure mechanisms of cinema itself.
And even from literature.
And all this to configure a space that is both mythical and unreal as politically opportune (there is talk of all those who are shipwrecked today) as existentially revealing.
The big surprise
But what has come to speak, in reality, is, and without detracting from anyone, of
'Brave Flash'
. If Malaga in 2021 will be remembered for something, it is because of that gale in the form of a mysterious fable pregnant with meaning that is Ainhoa Rodríguez's first film. Like Athena, who emerged from the head of her father Zeus, perfectly armed and ready to reign over the face of the Earth, this Extremadura was born into the cinema with a voice so genuinely her own and dazzling that it scares. And fall in love (it can be scary and captivate).
His film stops in the life of a group of women and from there elaborate a universe of hard and perfect desires
. And yet forgotten. What 'Brave Flash' does is an exercise in memory that is also an exercise in salvation. It is cinema that heals, cinema that transforms, cinema that questions the laziest rules, cinema that has come to revolutionize everything.
The film of the year shines and is called, how could it be otherwise,
'Brave Flash'.
Constructed halfway between documentary and fiction, each of the characters interprets himself (or herself, better) to inquire, question and, if necessary, be a different one. And yet the same. The result is a film that breathes like a strange yet dazzlingly familiar animal, as unique as it is perfectly alive.
It would be a mistake to be carried away by the absurd dynamics of the absurd awards that leave the supposedly special cinema in a corner.
At a time when the image suffers more and more from the evil of serialization, the standardization of the guidelines, the algorithm of the serial, cinema like '
Brave Flash' is
not only a provocation, but
a necessary provocation.
The nuance matters.
Thus the things, and despite the disease of the unanimity, it is convenient to keep the whole: '
The belly of the sea
', of course and by Nora Navas, and
'Brave flash'.
Both.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
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