The Filmoteca and the Mostra de Valencia dedicate a series to the Spanish director Isaki Lacuesta, who will receive the Palm of Honor for this edition of the festival. All his features and four of his shorts will be screened. Besides, the filmmaker will teach one masterclass. Any attempt to label the work of Isaki Lacuesta is doomed to failure. If something characterizes it, it is diversity, be of genres, media or formats, and creative freedom. At the beginning, it was awarded the label of non-fiction cinema, but his film practice defies any category and fluctuates between reality and fiction in unexpected ways, from his first and surprising feature film Cravan vs. Cravan (2002), passing through the extraordinary leaflet formed by The legend of time (2006) i between two waters (2018), until reaching his last films, fictions built on reality: one year, one night (2022), on the attack on the Bataclan hall, i Second prize (2023), what is and is not the story of the pop group Los Planetas. He has also directed pure fictions: The condemned (2009), a moral faula, according to the director himself; The next skin (2016), and thriller with a lot of suspense; the unexpected axis punk gangerrada, between Berlanga and Tarantino, what is They died beyond their means (2014).
His stories are searches and are full of missing or hidden people. Look for Camarón de la Isla in the gypsy adolescent and the Japanese girl fascinated by flamenc (The legend of time). To the missing boxer (Cravan vs. Cravan) or to the hidden artist in Africa (The double steps). To the real woman behind the Hollywood star we know as Ava Gardner (The night that never ends). To the missing guerrilla (The condemned) or the son who left (The next skin). His is a cinema full of ghosts: Arthur Craven, François Augièras, Ava Gardner, Island Shrimp, Ezekiel, Leo, The planets, the dead of the Bataclan.
The camera looks for the vestiges left by absence in the landscape, in art, in photography, in music: the rock painting of the two films with Miquel Barceló, Isra's tattoos, Camarón's songs, etc. I, especially, in faces and bodies. The inquiry is also about the actual act of filming and constructing an image and, that's why, we see Chris Marker bat, Jean Rouch, the vanguards, Dziga Vertov, Agnès Varda, Hollywood melodrama, adventure cinema, he western, the history of painting or photography, Pasolini, Murnau, Erice, Zulueta and much more. Said like this, it might seem that Lacuesta's cinema is a compendium of quotations and references, but nothing could be further from the truth and the experience of seeing his works, personalíssimes, originals i imprevisibles.
Isaki Lacuesta
Palm Tree of Honor 39 Valencia exhibition
25.10.2024 – 07.11.2024
25.10.24 FRIDAY / 22.30 h
28.10.24 MONDAY / 20.00 h
The condemned
ISAKI LACUESTA. Spain. 2009. Color. 94′. 35 mm.
Int. Barbara Lennie, Daniel Fanego, Leonor Manso, Nazareno Casero, Juana Hidalgo, Arturo Goetz.
Un antic militant argentí exiliat a Espanya rep la trucada d’un antic camarada, que li demana ajuda en els treballs no declarats d’excavació que ha iniciat en la selva per a trobar les restes d’un company dels dos.
