Official selection
Tallinn Black Nights 2018, Seville European Film Festival 2018, D'A Film Festival Barcelona 2019
Honors
Best Movie Movistar & prize in D'A Film Festival Barcelona
Best director in Torino Underground Cinefest
Best Movie in Festival Internacional de Jovenes Realizadores de Granada
Director
Armand Rovira
Writer
Saida Benzal, Armand Rovira
Cast
María Fajula, Almar G. Sato, Xavi Sáez, Saida Benzal
Producer
Mintxo Díaz, Jorge Vidal
“One of [the] black-and-white movies of the year – right up there with Pawe? Pawlikowski’s COLD WAR”Marta Balaga, CINEUROPA
Faith, addiction, the passing of time, separation and pain. Five aching letters to filmmaker Paul Morrissey, the essential and prolific cult auteur — most notable for 1966’s THE CHELSEA GIRLS and the FLESH (1968), TRASH (1970) and HEAT (1972) trilogy — and longtime collaborator, manager, and director of Andy Warhol’s many projects. Five characters in crisis, from different parts of the world, with their angst and fear, confiding and sharing their intimacy with the experimental master. Udo Strauss (but truly, Udo Kier) on his obsessive path, Joe d’Alessandro on his experience with drugs, the Chelsea Girls-esque Olena on her self-image, lovers on their impossible rupture (in a segment directed by the film’s screenwriter Saida Benzal), and Hiroko Tanaka on a torturous noise only she can hear.
An icon of underground cinema collides here with Armand Rovira, born in Barcelona in 1979, editor and director of several award-winning short films. Co-signing his first feature film with Benzal, Rovira’s five existential problems are treated with great finesse: shot in alternately Bergman-esque and Maddin-esque black & white, starkly written and experimentally developed on 16mm celluloid. Playing with various formats, split-screens, film scratching and a variety of techniques, each segment is unique — druggy, horrific or intimate — yet contributing to the overall cohesion of the film: a hypnotic collection of filmic correspondences, making poetry out of melancholy and darkness, and a slight nostalgia for a bygone era of the American underground that nonetheless lives on, and thrives in the cinema of today, and tomorrow. – Celia Pouzet
Showings
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