The road movie 'So Foul a Sky' by Galician director Álvaro Pulpeiro reflects on US intervention in countries of South America
The debut of Indian director Payal Kapadia, best documentary at Cannes, tackles the university riots of 2019 and the caste system in her country
Damien Odoul, one of the freest voices in French cinema, offers a paternalism-free look at a young man with Down syndrome
So Foul A Sky, by Álvaro F. Pulpeiro
Seville, 24th September 2021 - Gazing into the future of cinema and its reform is one of the fundamental characteristics of the Seville European Film Festival's programme, particularly of this section, Endless Revolutions, designed since its creation as a window onto the most audacious cinema by the most restless and daring filmmakers in European cinema.
In the 18th edition of the Seville European Film Festival, Endless Revolutions features six films, all of them Spanish premieres, that offer a profound reflection on reality in hostile territories such as India, which is ravaged by the caste system, Trump's divided America and Venezuela, on the verge of collapse, among others.
A Night of Knowing Nothing, is the promising debut of the young Indian director Payal Kapadia, winner of the Oeil d'Or for Best Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival. Carrying a powerful message, this debut feature tells the story of a fragile emotional relationship, skin-deep, that merges with the reality of contemporary India. Kapadia combines images of the university riots of 2019 with some love letters between two lovers, a fictional narrative thread elaborated from real stories that enables the filmmaker to connect the political and social history of those student movements with the intimate lives of the young people who took part in them.
A Night of Knowing Nothing, by Payal Kapadia
From India to Trump's America
French director Nicolas Peduzzi returns to the SEFF after presenting his debut film Southern Belle in 2017. Here, in Ghost Song, he travels to the depths of the US. In this second work, somewhere between documentary and fiction, Peduzzi portrays three young people whose lives are on turmoil, having hip hop culture and nightclubs as a backdrop, offering a powerful and highly creative look at the fragmented society of the Trump era.
Meanwhile, So Foul A Sky, the second feature film by the Galician Álvaro F. Pulpeiro, travels to the wild territory of the Venezuelan-Colombian border in a sort of road movie inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo (1904). Here Pulpeiro delves into the heart of Venezuela's oil mafias offering a profound reflection on North American intervention in the countries of the South in order to appropriate their resources.
Theo And The Metamorphosis, by Damien Odoul
In Outside Noise, Ted Fendt, an essential name in the new cinephilia and representative of North American indie, takes a leap to Europe to follow three young friends in search of their identity in a journey between Vienna and Berlin. A regular programmer at Lincoln Center in New York, he is also an editor and translator of texts by filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huille, and in this film he captures Central European territory on celluloid with an unusual luminosity.
In this selection also, two films deal with the relationship between parents and children from very different points of view. On the one hand, Theo and the Metamorphosis, by Damien Odoul, penetrates the universe of a young man with Down's syndrome who lives in the forest with his father, creating a world in which the real and the imagined are blurred. The film is an extraordinary example of the creative capacity of Odoul, a true European film sniper, poet and photographer, winner of the Jean Vigo prize in 2015 with La peur, and one of the most singular artists in French cinema.
Anatomia, by Ola Jankowska
Finally, Anatomia, the debut solo film by Polish director Ola Jankowska, deals with the reunion of a daughter with her father, who is hospitalised and suffers from severe brain damage and memory loss. Selected for the Giornata degli Autori at the Venice Film Festival, it is a film of enormous emotional depth that subtly portrays the relationship between a father and his daughter, whom he believes is still a teenager.
