Nisimazine San Sebastian 2014 #3

Nisimazine

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REVIEW 26th September 2014

SAN SEBASTIÁN

the magazine by NISI MASA - European Network of Young Cinema

Eden Loreak The Drop Ciencias Naturales Matías Lucchesi

from Eden by Mia Hansen Love

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Editorial

CREDITS NISIMAZINE SAN SEBASTIÁN 19 - 27 / 09 2014 Edition of 26nd September 2014

Sadly the glorious days of cinema in Donostia (Basque for San Sebastian) can’t last forever, and as the 62nd San Sebastian Film Festival starts to come to a close we’ve been thinking about how all good things must come to an end. Endings are incredibly important with regards to shaping our opinions and memories of an experience. Of course, a Nisimazine workshop is always rounded off with parties, newly-made friends and a finished product to be proud of. But this year many of the films on show here have also left a lasting impression on the team, due to their range of thrilling, haunting or downright mysterious final sequences.

which the final scenes resulted in hysterical laughter and applause. Finally, we have the films that open up more questions than they do answers. Carlos Vermut’s enthralling Magical Girl provided a divisive conclusion – some demanded more answers, while others were satisfied with the enigma. Either way, everyone was talking about it.

From earlier on in the week we had Phoenix and Loreak, two rather reserved films with quietly poignant endings. Beautifully shot, they left theatres in silence and lingered in the minds of many. Others have had the power to whip audiences into a frenzy: rarely has a screening caused such a joyous uproar as Damian Szifron’s Wild Tales, a comedy in

Sometimes, the end is just the beginning – so with that said I’ll finish, and let you get on to enjoying our 3rd newsletter!

It’s probably fair to say that all filmmakers have a desire for their films to exist long after the credits roll. Endings can create discussion, evoke emotion and make you think.

Sometimes, an ending can start a whole new train of thought.

EDITORIAL STAFF Director Fernando Vasquez Design & Coordination Francesca Merlo, Luisa Riviere, Lucía Ros Serra Communication Ewa Wildner Contributors to this issue Robyn Davis, Thomas Humphrey, Lucía Ros Serra, Hugo Gomes, Teresa Pereira, Mariana Mendes (photographer).

NISI MASA European Network of Young Cinema 99 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis 75010, Paris, France +33 (0)1 48 01 65 31 europe@nisimasa.com www.nisimasa.com www.nisimazine.eu A magazine published by NISI MASA in the framework of a film journalism workshop for young Europeans Special thanks to José Luis Rebordinos , Gemma Beltrán and Nekane Miranda

Robyn Davies (UK) With the support of the Youth in Action of the European Union. This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

@ Mariana Mendes

Picture of the day

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REVIEW

Eden Mia Hansen-Løve, FRANCE - Official Selection In Mia Hansen-Løve’s own words, Eden is a film which studiously tracks the historical «B-side» of the French Touch music scene. If that is as meaningless to you as it is to me, fear not. It means Mia has fictionalised the ups and downs of Cheers, a real-life French garage band, and the coterie of friends brought with them on the riptide of minor fame. Admittedly that is still clear as mud to me, but Eden does makes Cheers’ hidden music history very accessible by humorously contextualising it against Daft Punk’s prodigious, healthy success.

Eden never plays to just a niche audience. It’s musical backbone is carefully tailored to suit anybody born in the last thirty to forty years.

As long as you were born then, Eden will infectiously rehash your youth for you (and not in a STD way). Instead it will present previous decades in an irresistible nuanced form. As long as you’re even slightly receptive to this sort of thing, Eden will have you fidgeting in your seat like a withdrawing junky.

This is definitely a film you have to offer yourself up to. You’re best off taking an ecstasy pill and following the protagonist, Paul, down his magical, musical rabbit hole. I mean, it’s almost impossible to fight Hansen-Løve’s energetic style anyway. Mobs of bodies bob and gyrate tirelessly before you, and characters careen from one side of the screen to the other like rippling waves. Some viewers may experience this as exactly what film should be, whilst others may experience a violent motion sickness. That isn’t because Eden is one of those nauseating editing orgies, with ten cuts every second. But it almost is.

Youthful, bodily energy aside, Hansen-Løve also perfectly captures what French coolness is today, which is never just snorting lines coke. Although human hoover Paul does manage to snuffle enough powder to put even Noo-Noo on a good day to shame (a Teletubbiesbased analogy, fuck yeah). No, French coolness is mixing crack with Albert Camus; Submarine nightclubs with knitted scarves; choosing Paul Smith shirts over central heating. In short, it is a splash of hipster

erudition amidst a cocktail of addictions. And Hansen-Løve captures this to perfection. The question is whether you like that sort of thing.

Assuming you do, then Eden is very good. It’s one of those great films which allows teenagers to get their kicks without constantly dangling moralistic retribution over their head like a sword of Damocles.

This sympathy isn’t surprising either when you consider that HansenLøve describes Eden as a quasi-biography of her brother Sven, himself a DJ. Sven also co-wrote the film’s screenplay, perhaps explaining Eden’s incredible authenticity.

Rather amusingly, though, Hansen-Løve recently confessed that many French film institutions refused her funding because she did not depict any “violent” consequences to drug abuse. It is exactly not doing this which makes Eden such a success. Instead, the two Hansen-Løves show brilliantly both the euphoria and melancholy which comes with any lifestyle. And the way Paul’s unorthodox life continuously buffet against the cliffs of his ex-girlfriends’ attained normality really is brilliant.

However, there is one problem even bigger than Paul’s drug addiction in Eden. Somewhere, somehow, Eden became misogynistic. I don’t know how. It’s not the superficial misogyny in the script; that’s not meant to be taken seriously. It’s more the lack of emphasis on female characters that strikes me. By the film’s end all the women seem nothing more than an unimportant, interchangeable collection of tits and faces.

Mia did say that she intended Louise to be the key part of Paul’s life.

But I just don’t see it. You only needed to attend the press conference at San Sebastian to see that the director had only surrounded herself with the film’s male contingent. But this is the only complaint I can think of, so you probably should still see Eden.

Thomas Humphrey (UK)

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REVIEW

It is an apparent simplicity what introduces us in the story of Loreak: Ane, a woman entering menopause, receives a bouquet of flowers week after week, and always anonymously. A simple bouquet of flowers that also alters directly the life of Lourdes and Tere, a woman and her mother-in-law that don’t get along at all, sprouting feelings that seemed forgotten.

In a way, the flowers of Loreak are both detonators and conflict solvers, keeping three different women on the edge for years. Divided into three segments, each corresponding to those women who are receiving flowers, in a way or another, the film deals with issues such as love, death, jealousy and even the troubles of a midlife crisis, all in a very subtle way.

Loreak Jon Garaño, José Mari Goenaga, SPAIN - Official Selection

Loreak means flowers in the Basque language: a very strong word to describe something delicate and ephemeral. And that’s how exactly Loreak, the new film by Basque director José Mari Goenaga and Jon Garaño is; a delicate and romantic exercise about love and death, loneliness and second chances, even if they are given after death.

Goenaga and Garaño became ambassadors of Basque cinema when in 2010 they released 80 days, a film shot entirely in Euskera, and which had a long festival life, alongside getting its commercial release in countries like France. Their new work, hits now the big league of the San Sebastian Film Festival, becoming the first film shot entirely in the Basque language and competing for the Silver Shell award. Luckily, the language used ends up being a mere anecdote as the film (as it happened in 80 days) breaks with the prejudices about Basque cinema being too local to be understood by foreigners unaware of Basque particularities.

But what is most striking is not exactly what the film is about, but rather how the story is told. With a simple style that borders on manners, Garaño and Goenaga face their story with sensitivity and delicacy (honouring the name of the movie), thanks to a clear narrative and leisurely pace that brings us to this apparently relaxed universe. This is reinforced by the almost Martian sonority of the Basque language and the brilliant photography by Javi Aguirre.

Loreak is, at the end, a film about characters and their relationships would not be the same without the good work by its cast, and especially that of Nagore Aramburu, whose fragile and childish appearance get us perfectly in her early menopause and the crisis that entails, with a clean, yet tender and full look of uncertainty.

In short, Loreak is an intimate and tender film that manages to create a special universe, where three women live to forget their loneliness and find a new meaning of love and second chances, all thanks to a simple bouquet of flowers.

Lucía Ros Serra (Spain)

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REVIEW

rience is it´s process. Unlike most of American big studio films nowadays, Roskom choices are centred on character and constructing the details instead a doing a rushed and not well thought out thriller. Although he overdid some details, such as the framing, which is a little bit too obvious and exists mainly to give us clues about it´s all going to end.

The Drop Michael R. Roskom, USA - Official Selection Which film could gather a Oscar nominee director, a Writers Guild of America winner and two generations of prestigious actors?

The answer is The Drop, by Michael R. Roskom. After his Oscar nomination in 2011 with Bullhead, Michael Roskom now directs his first American studio film, based on the short-story, Animal Rescue, by Dennis Lehan, the author of Mystic River and winner of a Writers Guild of America Award for Television with The Wire.

This is the story of Bob (Tom Hardy), a nice low profile, a little bit dumb, guy who works on his cousin´s bar, Marv (James Gandolfini), where the Chechen mafia does their «drops» for money laundering. When Bob finds a puppy dumped in a trashcan, he finds himself taking care of another living being for the first time in his live. And that’s how he meets Nadia (Noomie Rapace) who helps him with the dog but has herself a troubled ex-boyfriend.

This story about innocence and second chances may not bring anything new or unexpected to audiences, but what makes this a worthwhile expe-

The technical details are the strength of the film. From the music to the good rhythm editing, all things work really well, building up great intense moments. Roskom uses cinematography to his favour, emphasizing the character’s attitude. In a film where the cold colours are predominant, he uses, at key moments, some almost imperceptible red elements, in the shape of lights, filters and props,perhaps to emphasize Bob’s feelings. The first scene where this happens, we realized that Bob finally is reaching a turning point, in a subtle but titillating moment.

Roskom’s really knows how to set the proper ambience to the film. Bob’s quiet attitude, yet surprisingly cold blooded sometimes, actually spreads to the mood of the film. With Bob we never know what to expect, is he a good or a bad guy? Is he smart or dumb? This ambiguity catches our attention until the end. Through the film we can see Bob, an apparently calm guy,that has a hidden force and a cloudy past. He is like a boiling water pan just seconds away from overflowing. We continually expect Bob’s mask to come off and this is the most well crafted point in the film.

Roskom´s work puts together the acclaimed James Gandolfini, unfortunately on his last role, and some of the most promising new generation of actors. The weaker character is definitely a cop called Torres, that doesn’t have a real weigh in the narrative. He is just there to follow, at a distance, the development of the events, even though he’s the only one who probably knows more about Bob. We always expect his intervention but then he almost disappears, reappearing again at the end just to, pointlessly, make it clear that he knows everything. The only question left to answer is how the end works. It seems to give us a sense of a small, unnecessary, hiccup.

The Drop is a story that keep us attached scene through scene. This isn’t a noisy or full of anger film, the beauty of it´s on the way all things seem to be undercover, like a thin layer of ice, that at any moment could break.

And that’s exactly how we want to feel while watching a thriller.

Teresa Pereira (Portugal)

than enough to make the teacher embark on a mission to help her student, and the two, as accomplices, decide to follow a journey in search of Lila’s father. With few clues, they are both throw themselves into the unknown.

Natural Sciences Matías Lucchesi, ARGENTINA, FRANCE - Official Selection Lila (Paula Hertzog) wants to know who is her father, but the only clue to his identity is a simple rusty plate of an antenna installation company. In the worst of scenarios, Lila, a girl who recently hit puberty, lives in the remote and often hostile «Los Condores», a mountainous region of Argentina. These two factors make our lead character kind of «marginal» in this rural area, especially in the natural sciences classes given by her teacher, Jimena (Paola Barrientos), who in one lesson explains the importance of photosynthesis in the healthy growth of a plant, and for this, it is necessary to have contact with several nutrients and factors.

Lila feels like a plant seed without these elements, unable to grow properly and unable to become an accomplished woman, at least that’s what Jimena defends, while trying to convince Lila’s mother to reveal the identity of her earlier «lover», but all in vain. However, the compassion she feels towards the little girl that is more

This same unknown works as a tour de force in this road movie with strong elements of the coming-to-age style. Natural Sciences, winner of the Generation Kplus Grand Prix in the last Berlin Film Festival, is a film noticeable by a consolidated reverence, by a gentleness that instils a smooth narrative that takes away any emotional coldness. Incidentally, like Barriento’s character, it is the compassion that makes the audience follow this story, told and retold a million times in the history of cinema. But the first feature film by Matías Lucchesi, who is a confessed road movies lover, culminates the scenarios like a symphony that pleases the emotions of his characters. For example, the Los Condores’s mountains are worked like a catalyst for Lila’s mood, we see a very cloudy and stormy weather front in the beginning, as the main character struggle with an identity dilemma. Another example is the fire of a locksmith shop as a warm sustenance of the film’s revelation, next to a clean and sunny sky that gives access to the personal concretization of the character.

Maybe Natural Sciences would have not work well if the young actress, Paula Hertzog, wasn’t the true emotional combustion of the film. Her performance is complemented by a strong character who introduces us maturity, something rebellious (that’s for sure), in a world that sometimes forgets their ethical responsibilities.

And as Lila, visibly Hertzog inherently and gradually grows on the big screen, its development, either as a character or as an actress, makes, for example, the final scene a triumphant sequence of woman’s emancipation: The personal liberation through the discovery of one self. Probably the greatest of all adventures in this Natural Sciences was taking the girl’s spirit, without it the journey would not even start.

Hugo Gomes (Portugal)

©Mariana Mendes

Interview with

Matías Lucchesi Director of ‘Natural Sciences’ - Horizontes Latinos - Argentina, France

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INTERVIEW

Natural Sciences is a small film which has been having an interesting path in the Film Festival circuit all over the world, winning several prizes, including a distinction at the Berlin Film Festival. It is a road movie about the search for our identity through parenthood. Being a film that addressed personal experiences, the director, Matías Lucchesi, sat down with us to express his own.

Could you tell us about the context of this production?

I made a lot of shorts before, but I got to a point when I wanted to make this feature film. The producer of that film told me that I must wait a year and half to film it, so I made Natural Sciences. I went to the Los Condores mountains, where I from, and then I saw an image of a woman and a little girl, and from that image, I start to talk to Gonzalo Salaya, who is the guy who wrote this film. This was a barely spontaneous film, with a simple and not very ambitious story, with one of the most important topics of life, our origin or identity. The story follows a little girl, who does not know who her father is or where he is. She lives in a border school in the mountains. So the movie it’s about her travel with her teacher. It´s about the search for her father, she only has one clue, a little rusty plate. It’s a kind of road movie but the not the classic road movie.

So is it a coming-to-age movie?

Yes, it is. This twelve years-old girl, the main character, entered puberty, so she has become a woman and she needs to know where she comes from. The mother does not let her know who the father is. She tries to run away from school, but the teacher understands her, and so she tries to help her.

Natural Sciences won some important prizes, how did they make you feel?

Yes, we won a prize in Berlin, the Generation Kplus Grand Prix, and the best feature, actress and screenplay in the Guadalajara Film Festival in Mexico, where we were competing with more than 18 films. Some of them bigger than Natural Sciences. We are very happy with those prizes, but we also understand that the prizes are subjective in cinema. It’s difficult to judge if a movie is bad, or this is best or better then something else. But the recognition is very important for my career, so it was all very surprising for us. This is a small film, but for me it has lots of power, because of the topic, the actors, we are very happy with them.

How was the experience to work with two different generations of actress?

Paula Hertzog, the main actress, it’s just a little girl but she made one film before in Mexico, El Prêmio, which won several prizes In Berlin. So she already had some experience. For Paula Barriento, who’s the teacher, she is a very well known actress in Argentina, but this was her first film. So I try to make a mix of actors of Buenos Aires and Cordoba.

Is the scenario important to this journey?

It’s called Altas Cumbres, in Cordoba, it’s like a little town behind the mountains. It is a very hostile and majestic place. And there is one particularly powerful location, very high, called La Pampa de La Chair. I was looking to capture the hostility of the place. Somehow there is a relationship between that and the difficulties that this child has to go through, so that helped the narrative of the film.

Natural Sciences, of course. It’s a film called Pampero, and will have three characters, one of them performed by Julio Chávez, an actor who won a Best Actor’s prize in Berlin several years ago. It’s a story about a father and son relationship, like Natural Sciences, is has the same topic. But it´s a sail boat journey from Buenos Aires to Uruguay.

So it appears you really like “road-movies”?

I like it very much, but in Pampero it isn´t just about the trip. The travel is only an excuse, and the action of the film kicks off when they abandon the boat.

Can you tell more about that big project that you originally wanted to do?

Big project? (laughs) it’s a way of speaking. It’s bigger than Hugo Gomes (Portugal)

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