The Stilts, 1984
A somber, despondent, middle-aged university professor and respected playwright named Ángel (Fernando Fernán Gómez) returns to a large, empty country cottage that has been covered and secured for the season, perhaps the first time that he has returned since the untimely death of his wife and children. Restless in his sleep and haunted by the memories of his lost family, Ángel impulsive decides to burn his manuscripts (whose authorship undoubtedly contributed to his estrangement from his family, even in life) - a figurative act of self-erasure that soon escalates to a suicide attempt. Locking himself in the propane tank storage room at the base of the house and opening the valves of all the cylinders, Ángel prepares to light the fatal match as the room fills with gas when he is caught in the act by his new neighbor, a school teacher named Teresa (Laura del Sol) who has coincidentally stopped by to introduce herself and borrow a bottle of wine. Inviting him over to meet her husband, Alberto (Antonio Banderas), an artist and aspiring actor from a traveling performance art troupe called The Stilts (named after their idiosyncratic use of prop stilts in their performances) who stage commissioned, harlequin, experimental street plays to entertain the public, Ángel is immediately captivated by the genial and attentive Teresa, drawn together by the shared intimacy of her respectful silence over his suicide attempt, and Antonio's sincere entreaties to author a script for the troupe for an upcoming children's engagement at a local park. Gradually emerging from his loneliness by a renewed sense of purpose, and deeply touched by their struggling, but seemingly idyllic, bohemian existence, Ángel begins to insinuate himself into the couple's life in an attempt to win Teresa's heart, a seemingly impossible, quixotic quest that drives him further into the darkness of his despair. Revisiting the themes of emotional displacement and projected desire of his earlier films, Peppermint Frappé and Carmen, and evoking the generational disconnection and rootlessness of Deprisa, Deprisa, The Stilts is a dreamlike and surreal, yet pensive, articulate, and understatedly resonant portrait of loss, grief, and healing. Juxtaposing the stilt performers' whimsical, absurdist fantasies with the moribund immediacy of Ángel's melancholy and isolation, the film becomes a lucid parable for the human imperative to reconnect with its own collective soul in the wake of profound tragedy - a metaphoric shedding of aloof and distancing escapist stilts that inevitably becomes a symbol for Ángel's own figurative return to the process of life on earth - a spiritual re-engagement with the travails and rapture of an imperfect, but redemptive but existence.
Posted by acquarello on Apr 29, 2007 | Permalink | Filed under 2007, Carlos Saura Retrospective
In an early episode in Carmen, Carlos Saura's second dance film with renowned flamenco artist Antonio Gades (in what would inevitably prove to be the second film of their collaborative Flamenco trilogy), a group of musicians rehearse at a large, open dance studio within earshot of the choreographer, Antonio (Gades) as he struggles to find the proper tempo suitable to adapting the Seguedilla from Bizet's opera for a flamenco performance. Reinterpreting the operatic work from a waltzy, 3/4 timed vocal piece to a sprightly, improvisational bulería, the musicians perform their rendition to the receptive Antonio who, along with his studio partner - and perhaps, erstwhile paramour - Cristina (Cristina Hoyos), begin to re-envision Carmen, not as a French composer's projection of the fiery gypsy seductress - and more broadly, a foreigner's stereotypical notions of Spanish culture - but rather, as an indigenous adaptation of Prosper Mérimée's novel, disconnected from the now iconic flourishes of Bizet's opera. But the process of casting Carmen invariably proves to be a more difficult task. Unable to find his envisioned Carmen from their stock company of highly talented dancers, and having implicitly rejected the idea of lead bailaora Cristina for the role in favor of casting a younger, more intriguingly mercurial performer, Antonio decides to broaden his search by visiting local dance schools, unconsciously setting his sights on an inscrutable student coincidentally named Carmen (Laura del Sol) after making an unconscious impression on him by arriving late to a castanet class. From the onset, Antonio's personal selection of the undisciplined Carmen seems ill conceived. Unable to properly follow Cristina's instruction to articulate gestures and project the necessary intensity demanded by the challenging choreography, Carmen initially seems relegated to return to the mediocre performances that have defined her earlier career as a flamenco side show dancer at a local restaurant that caters to a predominantly tourist clientele. However, as Antonio becomes increasingly consumed with the idea of molding Carmen into both the image of his envisioned, tragic heroine and ideal romantic interest, truth and fiction begin to blur in the intoxicating haze of passion, possession, jealousy, and betrayal. Anticipating the interwoven Pirandellian narratives of Abbas Kiarostami's Koker trilogy (especially the young couple of 
Inasmuch as Hou Hsiao Hsien's 
In a sense, Carlos Saura's first foray into filming classical dance, Blood Wedding, may be seen, not as a stark departure from the immediacy of his narrative films, but rather, as an oblique return to form towards the social interrogations implicit in his earlier work on the fundamental question of Spanish identity - a particularly timely and relevant re-assessment in the aftermath of a contemporary history marked by institutional repression, creative censorship, and historical revisionism. It is within this framework that the selected adaptation of the seminal "rural trilogy" play by Spanish playwright, Federico García Lorca - a writer who was executed by Falangists in the early days of the Civil War and whose work was generally banned throughout Franco's regime - seems particularly suited to this post Franco-era cultural introspection in its dark and tragic tale of passion, betrayal, and revenge. Ushering the beginning of Saura's collaborative work with internationally renowned Flamenco dancer and choreographer 
Returning to the dysfunctional family dynamic and generational saga of Anna and the Wolves in its psychological exposition into the root of ingrained human cruelty and repression, Mama Turns 100 Years Old is a wry, eccentric, and provocative, if underformed satire on the latent trauma and moral repercussions of emotional subjugation, manipulation, and corruption. On the eve of the indomitable family matriarch, Mama's (Rafaela Aparicio) centenary, former domestic servant Ana (Geraldine Chaplin), now the happily settled wife of a devoted, bohemian husband named Antonio (Norman Briski), has received a personal invitation from Mama herself to stay as a guest in the secluded family estate and celebrate the festivities - an unexpected request that, as Mama subsequently reveals, stems from the inescapable conviction that her family, goaded in part by her conniving daughter-in-law, Luchi (Charo Soriano) and enabled by her dotty, gullible son, Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez), has been underhandedly plotting to kill her before she reaches the all-important milestone. However, as Ana and Antonio alternately settle into their awkward roles as accommodating guests of absurd, idiosyncratic rituals and bemused observers of a deeply rended (if superficially intact) familial intimacy, the couple, too, inevitably becomes caught up in the corrosive atmosphere of petty infighting, superficial civility, aimless distraction, nebulous alliances, and emotional deception (a figurative entrapment that is visually encapsulated in Anna accidentally stepping into a rabbit trap within the estate grounds). As in Anna and the Wolves, Saura seamlessly interweaves oneiric images (including the addition of excerpts from the preceding film) and elements of magical realism to illustrate the integral correlation between psychological trauma and physical (and behavioral) manifestation. Concluding with the truncated shot of Mama figuratively casting out the scheming relatives from her immediate circle, the surreal parting image becomes that, not of banishment from paradise, but a reluctant liberation from the performance of a grotesque, dehumanizing charade.
Marking Carlos Saura's first film following the death of Franco in 1975 as Spain emerged from the shadows of fascism towards democracy, Elisa, My Love also represents Saura's creative transition from allusively political to integrally personal filmmaking, resulting in one of his most intimate, captivating, emotionally lucid, and profoundly introspective works on loneliness, aging, passion, reconciliation, and legacy. The film opens to a curiously apparent disjunction: a male narrator recounts an impulsive decision to embark on a haphazardly arranged trip organized by the family from Madrid to the country upon receiving word of their estranged father's deteriorating health and compromised recuperation after a recently undergone surgery - a reluctant journey to a distant parent that had only been made palatable by the idea of spending time away from home, and providing a convenient distraction from ongoing marital troubles with a (presumably male) spouse named Antonio. In hindsight, the assignment of the masculine voice - later illustrated to be the father's, a writer and school teacher named Luis (Fernando Rey) - for what is subsequently revealed to be the unexpressed sentiments of his vulnerable and emotionally fragile daughter, Elisa (Geraldine Chaplin) proves to be an incisive trompe l'oeil (or rather, trompe l'oreille) that prefigures the profound, almost instinctual connection between absent father and lost child. Having left his wife (who, uncoincidentally, bears striking physical resemblance to the now adult Elisa) and the family home when Elisa was still a child (Ana Torrent), Luis has broken from his past - not to embark on a new adventure or in search of something better - but to escape its emotional burden, retiring to the country to lead a humble life of solitude writing his autofictional stories from a rented cabin. Encountering a deeply introspective, unfinished, diaristic manuscript among the work-in-progress papers on her father's desk, Elisa is immediately drawn to her father's pensive isolation, and accepts his invitation to spend a few days at the cabin where gradually, past and present, reality and imagination, dream and anxiety converge to give form to Elisa's ephemeral, unarticulated despair over her parents' traumatic separation and her own failing marriage. Saura's perceptive juxtaposition of the dark and cramped cabin against the vast, open fields of the rural landscape (a contrasted visual framing that is also underscored in the bookending long shot of the family automobile traversing the unpaved road that leads to the cabin) proves especially suited to the film's alternating realms of physical and psychological realities - a paradoxical metaphor that encapsulates Elisa's emotional and existential limbo (and perhaps, more broadly, an indirect allusion to the state of post-Franco Spain itself) between captivity and liberation, terminality and perpetuity, death and transfiguration.
In The Garden of Delights, Carlos Saura infuses his now familiar, archetypal elements of financial crisis, physical disability, infirmity, and game hunting that were introduced in his seminal film, 
Anticipating Theo Angelopoulos' The Hunters in its allegorical dissection of a dysfunctional, polarized, contemporary society engendered by the incestuous and repressive, right-wing regime, Carlos Saura's taut and subversive magnum opus, The Hunt is a harrowing and potent exposition into the pervasive moral corruption that has surfaced under a corrosive combination of Franco-era class entrenchment and bourgeois entitlement, and a collective consciousness deeply ingrained by an endemic culture of machismo and violence. A seemingly unassuming hunting excursion on a sweltering, summer day that has been arranged by middle-aged aristocrat, Don José (Ismael Merlo) sets the stage for Saura's fiercely uncompromising indictment of the country's inexorable path towards self-destruction in the wake of its own rigid and inhumane ideology. Hosting a rabbit hunt for his longtime (if largely estranged) friends, the recently divorced Luis (José María Prada) and self-made businessman, Paco (Alfredo Mayo) - former Nationalist soldiers who, coincidentally, once fought the Loyalists during the Civil War in the same parched and desolate terrain that is now their hunting grounds - José's nebulous motivation for arranging such an idyllic outing is intimated through vague, private conversations between business partners José and Luis that allude to their mutual interest in gaining Paco's favor, as well as through conversations between the skeptical Paco and his young brother-in-law and protégé, Enrique (Emilio Gutiérrez Caba) who immediately suspect an ulterior, financial motive behind their host's unexpected, generous invitation. Chronicling the quartet's idyllic summer outing as the exhilaration of the free range morning hunt invariably gives way to the restlessness of idle waiting, alcohol consumption, exploration, and target practice as José's dutiful games keeper, Juan (Fernando Sánchez Polack) prepares his pet ferret to enter a rabbit's lair for another round of hunting, Saura's austere and clinical gaze - a visual aesthetic that is also reinforced in the film's high contrast black and white photography - inevitably transforms from the role of social observer to behaviorist as the hunters' own cultivated habits of desperate, economic (and social) self-preservation are refracted through the scampering rabbits' own traumatized (and often, fatally predictable), instinctual behaviors for survival against the confused brutality of the hunt. The implicit correlation between the hunters and the hunted - an integral sameness that alludes to the superficiality of an artificially imposed hierarchical order - is also manifested through Paco's pathological aversion towards the crippled Juan (who may have sustained the injury by stepping into one of the many rabbit traps that riddle the area) that is subsequently echoed in his underlying obsession with a myxomatosis epidemic among the hunted rabbits (an intolerance for weakness that is further reinforced in his presumption that Juan has eaten the infected rabbits). Illustrated though the rampant contagion that has ravaged the rabbit population, Saura paints a provocative and harrowing allegory for the cultural death of post Civil War, Franco-era Spain, not through the imposed violence of systematic extermination, but rather, through the implosive, decadent intoxication of self-inflicted, arbitrary privilege.
During the introductory remarks for Max and Mona, filmmaker Teddy Mattera indicated that the inspiration for the film came from two parallel thoughts: a romanticization of death stemming from the traditional belief that the souls of the recently deceased are not able to cross over to the spiritual realm unless their passing has been properly grieved on earth, as well as an autobiographical context over his own family's ancestral heritage as village mourners who were often called upon to assist in funerals (especially for those who left few, if any, surviving relatives). What unexpectedly emerges from this droll and eccentric concoction of interconnected ideas is an idiosyncratically offbeat, charming, if slight comedy that subverts deeply cherished, old-world traditions into a modern-day confidence game - exploiting the resigned certainty of death into a lucrative specialty service of ushering the souls of the all-too-humanly flawed and not-quite-so-virtuous for transcendence into the hereafter. At the heart of the popular (and profitable) enterprise is the naïve, village son and aspiring medical student, Max (Mpho Lovinga), a sensitive young man with a natural ability for turning on the emotional waterworks during funerals... a talent so unparalleled throughout the country that the he has served as the town's official mourner for several years, and who, in gratitude, has been sponsored by the villagers to go to Johannesburg and fulfill his lifelong dream of studying medicine, enabling him to retire from his ancestral trade. However, when Max is forced to spend the evening at the home of his layabout uncle, Norman (Jerry Mofokeng) after arriving late to the university for matriculation (a delay inadvertently caused by an errant sacrificial goat - the titular Mona - that he has agreed to transport for an upcoming wedding), he is soon forced to once again tap into his former career as a professional mourner in order to set things right. Alternating humor and pathos, over-the-top situations and understated moments of connection and humanity, Max and Mona is a good-natured and delightfully unassuming tale of community, familial obligation, and inescapable destiny.
A collaborative film from the Women Filmmakers of the Zimbabwe Production Skills Workshop, At the Water is an acute and poetic allegory for the often colliding moral dilemma between imposed religion and entrenched superstitions in seemingly progressive, yet still deeply traditional cultures. Opening to the image of a devout Christian woman, Netsai who, as the film begins, accompanies her husband to the main road one morning as he goes off to work and who, along the way, crosses path with an enigmatic stranger dressed in a dark suit only moments before witnessing her husband's sudden death in an automobile accident, the film chronicles Netsai's emotional - and psychological - descent in the aftermath of the tragedy. Withdrawing from the community, Netsai and her young son retreat into a life of insular, if devoted quotidian ritual, until one day when her son vanishes without a trace near the riverbank. Unable to find solace in her faith, she turns to the village spiritual healer, who reveals that the river god exacts an inhuman price in exchange for the child's safe return. Filmed in digital video, the striking, high contrast color palette of At the Water proves ideally suited to the film's overarching themes of testing faith, divine silence, and moral absolutes in a time of spiritual crisis and profound desolation.
Something of a cross between an autobiographical road trip and a personal essay on the untold, residual legacy of Angola's turbulent twentieth century history as the country continues to struggle to recover from Portuguese colonization and a protracted civil war, Abderrahmane Sissako's Rostov-Luanda is an understated, yet pensive and illuminating rumination on the pervasive state of political and economic (and moral) stagnation that continues to shape the collective psyche of modern day African countries. A well worn, decades old class photograph composed of multi-ethnic students studying abroad in Soviet-era Moscow that has been obtained from a Russian friend provides the indeterminate, organic roadmap for Sissako's cross-country journey into the sublime, yet desolate landscape of postwar Angola. Recalling his shared hopes and youthful idealism for the cultural resurgence of a post-colonial African continent with fellow African student Alfonso Baribanga, Sissako embarks on a trip to his colleague's homeland in the aftermath of a devastating, Cold War-fueled, civil war. Encountering a series of strangers from the country's rich and diverse spectrum of ethnic and economic social strata who collectively define the face of modern Angola, Sissako's informal interviews with local residents inevitably take on the form of personal reflections and human testimonies that illustrate the country's deeply factional (and fractured) contemporary history even as it successfully cultivated a color blind, heterogeneous, assimilated society between Portuguese settlers and indigenous people (enabling a literal cultural interrogation that anticipates Khalo Matabane's own "road movie" approach to capturing the sentimental landscape of post-apartheid South Africa in 
The age-old struggle between gender roles, rigid (yet inevitably shifting) traditions, and women's liberation plays out as a light-hearted, yet astute domestic comedy in Nacro's Bintou, the 2001 Best Short Film Prize award winner at FESPACO. Unfolding through the eyes of a village housewife, Bintou's efforts as she resolves to start her own business - and persevere against overwhelming odds - despite her husband Abel's petty attempts at sabotaging her fledgling sprouted millet cottage industry (invariably fueled by the villagers' implicit insecurities over their own domestic dispensability) and her mother-in-law's strenuous objections over the rightful place of women in the home, the film is also an insightful universal tale of the everyday cultural struggles between tradition and modernity and the often slippery process of gender equality that characterize contemporary society. At the heart of Bintou's seemingly insurmountable task is her determination to single-handedly raise money for her daughter's education after her husband, a gainfully employed carpenter, decides to only provide school tuition for their two sons. Chronicling Bintou's evolution from desperate mother, to resourceful businesswoman, to reliable marketer, and finally, to inspirational leader, the film is a refreshingly light-handed exposition on community, family, and women's empowerment.
The coincidental, near parallel deaths of unarmed Guinean immigrant (and innocent victim), Amadou Diallo in the hallway of his apartment building at the hands of over-aggressive police officers in 1999, and American Peace Corps volunteer Jesse Thyne on the treacherous rural roads of Guinea en route back to Diallo's ancestral village, serve as a potent and thought provoking framework for Micah Schaffer's trenchant, impassioned, and deeply moving social interrogation on the nature of economic imperialism, racial privilege, marginalization, and cultural arrogance in Death of Two Sons. Far from the terse, tabloid encapsulation of Diallo's tragically cut short life as a common West African street peddler, the film traces Diallo's often under-emphasized privileged upbringing, globetrotting, and enrollment in some of the finest schools as the son of an international businessman who, rather than stay in Guinea where he would have undoubtedly coasted through a high ranking career and become one of the nation's emerging leaders, went against his family's wishes to instead forge a new life in the U.S., seeing his struggle as building the rudiments of an instilled work ethic that would build character and ensure his future success I his adopted country. Similarly, Jesse Thyne, the adopted son of a California pastor, lived a life of middle-class comfortability, an uneventful upbringing that, as his parents surmise, may have been deeply marked by his childhood experience with abandonment in the early years before his adoption into their family. Unable to find his birth mother, Jesse would later join the Peace Corps, perhaps as a means of embracing all of humanity as his interconnected identity, where he was assigned to work in Diallo's ancestral village as a teacher, often dining with Diallo's extended family, and subsequently, was invited to attend to his funeral. A few months later, as a passenger on a taxi hired to transport several Peace Corps volunteer back to their villages after a holiday outing, Thyne and a fellow volunteer, Justin Bhansali would also perish, this time, at the scene of a high impact vehicle collision. However, as Schaffer incisively captures, what inevitably characterizes the uncanny coincidence of Diallo and Thyne's proximal deaths is not the eerily karmic connection between these two young men who have never met, but rather, the profound disparity in the way that justice was carried out in the aftermath of their deaths. Contrasting the acquittal of the four New York City police officers on all charges - including the lesser included offense of reckless endangerment - with the three year prison sentence handed out by the Guinean court to the taxi driver as punishment for an analogous vehicular offense for speeding (and subsequently led to a nationwide road safety campaign in memory of the Peace Corps victims), the inescapable sentiment of inequitable justice is precisely articulated in a comment by Thyne's father that, while "Jesse's death was a tragedy, Amadou's death was a tragedy and a travesty."
Moussa Sene Absa's epic and sprawling urban tale Teranga Blues appropriately opens to the shot of a Senegalese musician, Madiké "Dick" Diop (Lord Alajiman) being escorted by French authorities in handcuffs before a brief, procedural handover with local immigration officials releases him into their custody, and back out to freedom into the streets of Dakar with little more than a 20 Euro note in his pocket. The image of the deported, down and out musician in restraints would prove to be a prescient metaphor for Dick's figurative bondage upon returning to his native land. Reluctant to return home with unrealized dreams of wealth and fame, Dick falls into the nefarious company of a childhood friend, Maxu (Ibrahima Mbaye), an ambitious gangster and low level toadie to a well connected black market arms dealer named Zéka (Zéka La Plaine), who arranges to furnish him with a lavish loan in order to project an image of success for the native son's triumphant homecoming to his mother, Soukèye (Yakhara Deme) and sister, Rokhaya's (Rokhaya Niang) shantytown home. Borrowing heavily from his newfound underworld associates in order to endow his family with the financial means to leave the impoverished village and build a new home in a more affluent community, and persuaded into an unholy alliance with promises to help establish his music career, Dick invariably becomes indebted to the pragmatic and enterprising Zéka who, in turn, sees in Dick's directness and integrity a veritable potential to move up in the ranks as his trusted lieutenant. In its elemental fusion of universal, cautionary tale on the lure of easy money with a compassionate social commentary on the endemic cycle of poverty and disenfranchisement, Teranga Blues transforms from seemingly idiosyncratic amalgam of lyrical romance, carnivalesque (sur)realism, gangster film, slice-of-life portrait, and portentous tragedy into a sincere and impassioned, larger-than-life contemporary urban opera on star-crossed fate and inescapable destiny.
Following a lively introductory performance by a traditional African griot, the 14th annual New York African Film Festival officially opened with the film, Clouds Over Conakry from Guinean filmmaker Cheick Fantamady Camara, a selection that seems ideally suited to the festival's commemoration of Africa's 50 years of independence and (indigenous) cinema - a humorous, lyrical, and engaging, yet thoughtful and impassioned cautionary tale on the intractable social dichotomies between tradition and modernity - the personal (and cultural) struggle to find moral balance between upholding indigenous customs and embracing progressive ideals - that continue to shape contemporary African society. At the heart of the conflict is a talented political cartoonist and artist, Bangali, affectionately known as BB (a homonymous nickname that alludes to the film's catalytic cultural collision, an out of wedlock baby) who pseudonymously signs his newspaper with a rudimentary glyph in order to conceal his life's vocation (and passion) from his father, a superstitious, and deeply old fashioned marabout. In love with his mentor and editor's beautiful daughter, Kesso, a web designer who, on a whim, entered the audition for the Miss Guinea pageant and now unexpectedly finds herself competing for the title, BB's hopes for a life together with his beloved Kesso and a professional career as an artist is soon dimmed when his father, having experienced a dream that he believes was guided by the spirit of their village ancestors, decides to bypass his religious, older son's wishes to study abroad and become an imam, and instead, chooses his visibly disinterested younger son, BB, to succeed him in their ancestral vocation. But when his father is summoned by a government official to lead a prayer service on a pre-appointed day and time to help end the city's unseasonable drought - a divine invocation that seems all too conveniently effective - BB begins to question the integrity of the often conflicting advice offered by well-intentioned people around him. Beyond the often explored territory of cultural contradiction, perhaps what makes Clouds Over Conakry particularly insightful is Camara's ability to capture the moral nuances and shades of grey that appropriately - and relevantly - capture the complexity of contemporary existence: the father's infusion of tribal fetishism with Islamic worship is confronted through the older son's orthodox scholarship of the Qur'an, and who, in turn, is confronted with the inhumanity intrinsic in his more fundamentalist views towards the (mis)treatment of women; a woman's reproductive rights paradoxically brings tragedy to both sides of the ideological debate; the idea of a free press is compromised by the editor's self-censorship approach to the reporting (and suppression) of information in order to avoid controversy and maintain the paper's access to influential leaders (and implicitly, uphold the status quo); the separation of church and state is blurred by the political cultivation of alliances with influential spiritual leaders in an attempt to rein in loyal, faith-based voters into their political campaigns.
Teboho Mahlatsi's sumptuous, atmospheric, and gorgeously shot contribution for the