The new edition of D’A kicks off this Thursday with the screening of ‘Alcarràs’, the film by Carla Simón, which will be in commercial theaters starting Friday. Like every year, the Barcelona auteur film competition presents a suggestive selection of titles that have triumphed at other festivals, in which established filmmakers mix with new promises.
It also dedicates a retrospective to the Critics’ Week at the Cannes festival, which celebrates its 60th anniversary, and a cosmogonic vision of the new and young Spanish filmmakers, in long and short format, framed in the section A collective impulse.
With face-to-face normality restored, we highlight below, as a guide, 10 of the films that should not be missed at the event.
British director Terence Davies is a regular at D’A and continues to be one of the most personal and coherent authors of his country’s cinema. In his latest film, the author of major titles such as ‘Distant Voices’ and ‘The Deep Blue Sea’ recounts the story of the homosexual poet Siegfried Sassoon, who fought in the First World War, wore decorations and, upon returning to civilian life, strongly questioned that his Government was still involved in the dispute. Shot with his usual meticulousness and clairvoyance. April 30, 8:00 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca 2; May 8, 8:30 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca 2.
Authentic ‘enfant terrible’ of French cinema, Bruno Dumont makes a threat of a more conventional story with ‘France’. After works as radical as ‘Humanity’ and peculiar comic explorations of the Pas-de-Calais region in television format –’Little Quinquin’ and ‘Coincoin and the extrahumans’–, the filmmaker faces the vital journey of a journalist whose life changes completely when he runs over a delivery man. Léa Seydoux, Europe’s fittest actress, embodies the protagonist of this mixture of existentialism, spiritual journey and sarcasm. April 29, 5:30 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca 2; May 5, 10:00 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca 2.
Written by Clara Roquet, the award-winning director of ‘Libertad’, the film focuses on a family that leaves the urban center to seek their particular utopia outside the city. But the construction of a landfill near his home in Beirut puts his vital adventure in jeopardy. Mounia Akl’s first solo film and starring actress and director Nadine Labaki. May 4, 7:00 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca 2; May 5, 7:45 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca 2.
Another highly esteemed filmmaker at the D’A, to whom a retrospective was already dedicated in 2019, is Christophe Honoré. The director of ‘Love Songs’ and ‘La belle personne’ places his latest film at a convulsive moment for everyone, that of the recent pandemic, explaining the experiences of the Comèdie Française performers who see a montage about a play cut short of Proust due to confinement. Despite everything, they decide to represent her. The film reproduces the real situation experienced by the actors and by Honoré himself. May 1, 10:00 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca 2; May 7, 7:30 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca 2..
Delusions, nightmares, alcohol, cold, uncertainty, collapses, nihilism… This is how Kirill Serebrennikov, a filmmaker who has faced Vladimir Putin’s regime for years, portrays life in a dark and strange Russia. The main characters suffer from the effects of a strange flu. Their consciousness changes, they do not know if what they are seeing and experiencing is real or the result of a hallucinogenic dream. A film that demonstrates the overflowing narrative and visual drive of this filmmaker and theater director, already seen in his previous ‘Leto’. May 2, 8:00 p.m., Zumzeig; May 3, 7:30 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca 2.
Mia Hansen-Love talks about herself, working as a couple and, possibly, aspects of the recent past – her relationship with fellow director Olivier Assayas – in this reflection on film creation. The film is set in a sacred place for all film buffs, the island of Farö, where Ingmar Bergman lived and shot major works such as ‘Persona’. Vicky Krieps (‘The Invisible Thread’) and Tim Roth (‘Reservoir Dogs’) form a strange but magnetic couple. They are two filmmakers who come to the ‘bergmanian’ island in search of inspiration to write a script. An interesting game of mirrors. May 3, 8:00 p.m., Teatre CCCB; May 8, 6:00 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca 2.
The penultimate film by the prolific Hong Sang-so, the premiere of the other one he made last year, ‘Introduction’, and with another freshly baked at the Berlinale, ‘The novelist’s film’, still recently among us, does not have its usual interpreter Kim Min-hee, as the spotlight falls on a veteran actress who returns to Korea. A young filmmaker tries by all means to get him to take part in his next film. As usual in Sang-soo, the encounters between the two take place in bars and amid the effluvia of alcohol. The female lead is Lee Hye-yeong, a popular Korean actress from the 1980s and 1990s. April 29, 8:00 pm, Teatre CCCB; May 3, 10:30 p.m., CCCB Theater.
Portrait of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, based on a 20-year-old man who is helpless to prevent the demolition of the house of his life, the white building of the title. It is also a forceful criticism against gentrification. It is the first feature film by Cambodian director Kavich Neang and has been sponsored as producer by Jia Zhang-ke. As contemplative as realistic, always close to the portrayed characters. May 2, 10:30 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca 2; May 3, 5:30 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca 2.
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Apichatpong Weerasethakul is the figurehead of Thai cinema. The author of the award-winning ‘Uncle Boonmee remembers his past lives’ has been in Barcelona for weeks with an exhibition at the Center Fabra i Coats. In ‘Memory’ he breaks some of his habits. First of all, he leaves his natural place, the Thai jungle, to shoot in Colombia. Secondly, it has an international actress of the prestige of Tilda Swinton, a regular for years in cinematographic proposals from different latitudes, redefining auteur cinema. In the film, Swinton is a botanist who travels to the Colombian jungle in search of a sound that only she can hear. May 6, 8:00 p.m., Renoir Floridablanca; May 7, 6:00 p.m., Zumzeig.
Presented at the Berlin festival and a winner at the Malaga festival, ‘Cinco lobitos’ is the x-ray of a helpless character at a crucial moment in his life. Laia Costa plays a young woman who has just had a child, she doesn’t know how to accept this new reality, she disagrees with her partner and ends up moving to her parents’ house in the Basque Country, where she will then be a mother, true, but she will be daughter, and in a complicated situation. Closing of the D’A. May 7, 8:00 p.m., CCCB Theater.