• Berlin Festival The most Spanish Berlinale starts lost with an exhausting romantic comedy

  • Interview Paul B. Preciado: "I am a dissident of the sexual system"

  • Interview Michelle Williams: "I left home at 15 and didn't finish high school: succeeding as an actress was a matter of survival for me"

Taking the language of philosophy to the cinema can be understood, in its radicalism and lyricism,

a transgender effort.

The essentially normative phrases of grammar, of productive thought and of the meaning of what is given -in a double meaning as destination or direction towards something more or less absolute and as unveiling of the hidden- suddenly acquire the tactile dimension on the screen and even festive of the immediate, of the visible, of what is difficult to categorize in assertive logic.

Or binary, which is the same.

The late Godard used to say that the cinema is a sign and the signs are among us.

And he continued: "Cinema is the only thing that has given us a sign. The others have given us orders. Cinema is a sign to interpret, to play with, and you have to live with it."

And the philosopher

Paul B. Preciado

offered a good example of all of the above at the Berlinale: rigorous thought applied to the cross-border essence of cinema, of cinema as a sign.

The first film as a director of the most universal Spanish thinker,

Orlando, ma biographie politique

(Orlando, my political biography), is a deep and at the same time joyous reflection on himself that also wants to be a reflection on the new reality of all of us.

Preciado defines himself as a trans man with a non-binary body and his creed stands for overcoming assertive schemes that determine sexual difference.

Said like this, it would seem like a comment at the bottom of the recently approved

Trans Law

and, in reality, it is rather the other way around.

The new norm would be the verification of what is happening (of what is happening to us) and of what Preciado is a rigorous executor.

The film follows in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf

's novel

Orlando

.

The director says, and he does it with his own voice on the tape, that he wanted to tell his life, but in reality his life was told before him a century ago by the British writer in the text of the young man who grew up to become a 36 year old woman.

Orlando's journey, which is also transition, is the same as that of all non-binary bodies and Orlando is all over the world.

Preciado appropriates the authentic voice of many of those '

orlandos

' to the point of confusing it with his own, and thus creating

a brilliant, poetic and even incandescent tapestry.

tight that ends up being the best representation, alive and changing, of a reality that is also a struggle.

Every Orlando is a fight at the very risk of life against government laws, against history, against psychiatry, against an "essentialist and patriarchal" feminism, against the traditional idea of ​​the family and, if necessary, against pharmaceutical companies. .

The director himself says in the presentation of the film: "If masculine and feminine are ultimately political and social fictions, '

Orlando, ma biographie politique

' wants to show us that change is no longer just about gender, but also about poetry, love and skin color".

And, indeed, where the film becomes great is not so much in its character of testimony, claim or, even, debate (which also), but in the certainty

and clarity of both the pain in the face of contempt and the joy when the day arrives. recognition.

This new '

Orlando

' (Jane Campion's spectacular 1992 masterpiece should not be forgotten) is above all

humanist poetry for freedom.

This new Orlando does not give orders, it offers the clarity of the sign that is the cinema.

Brilliant without a doubt.

María Vázquez in an image of 'Matria', by Álvaro Gago. WORLD

THE DISCUSSED MATRIARCHY

If the film by Paul B. Preciado was presented in the Encuentros section, the other Spanish proposal of the day was in Panorama.

And, although they hinder each other because of the headline, the truth is that the decision seems even coherent.

'

Matria

', by

Álvaro Gago

and with a

stellar, stark María Vázquez, places herself, like her dance partner in the randomness of programming, in a space so intimate and personal that it cannot be less than exclusively political

.

The fact that what is being discussed is the supposed Galician matriarchy as another expression of the submission of women, places the two productions, even from very different points of view, in the same anti-normative harmony (let's put it that way).

'

Matria

' follows in the footsteps of a woman named Ramona.

And it's not easy.

Ramona works in an industrial cleaning company at the same time that she does it collecting mussels.

And all this, while she fights with her 18-year-old daughter, with her husband, with her boss who wants to lower her salary and with everyone who dares to argue with her space and her word.

The film successfully folds, and makes it submissive, to the movements of its protagonist, feverish and calm, violent and tender, energetic and fainting, funny and hurtful, all at the same time, until extracting from the petite body of an enormous

actress

a illuminated portrait of life itself.

No more.

Before the recently presented feature film, and with the same title, its director made a documentary.

He recounted Francisca's life in real body (and time).

The texture of the truth guided the steps to a work designed to be a witness.

Now, that same rough skin of reality is the one that orders each shot planned as a burst of sincerity.

"My idea was to expand the universe of the protagonist of the first film and do it with a completely transparent layer of fiction," reasons Gago.

The director says that among the first motivations for the film was to refute the false myth of the Galician matriarchy that

dresses as empowerment which, in truth, is nothing more than one more form of exploitation.

And he corrects himself and adds that away from him the temptation of the proclamation.

"To the political for the intimate," she insists.

The result is a film that, rather than simply being seen, is lived and felt like a blow, like a fire.

That, or to go back to the beginning, a film that understands cinema as, in effect, an open sign to live with.

And this thanks to an actress with previous works such as '

Trote

' or '

Blackout

' who, without a doubt, deserves more.

We deserve more of her.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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