Cinema on the brink of convention collapse

A small Spanish town between patriarchy, Catholicism and obsolescence. Here, women's unfulfilled longings collide with the inadequacies of a doomed male world. It is a story of desperate attempts to break out. But this courageous first feature becomes a successful unity less through its plot than through an aesthetic of suggestive and mysterious scenes, photographed in images of a strangely pale lack of colour. Tonight, the Spanish Competition entry by Ainhoa Rodríguez ›Destello Bravío‹ premiers in Heidelberg. Directly afterwards, the film will also be available on our IFFMH stream.

The three protagonists in Miguel Gomes' new prank seem to find the great love: But in ›The Tsugua Diaries‹, which he co-directed with Maureen Fazendeiro, is nothing like it seems in ordinary romantic comedies: people who usually stay behind the camera are part of the story, the sound man wants to say something, the director is on the couch, the film exposes its making. A crisis meeting is called because one of the team has not kept to the Corona measures. The look behind the scenes is mischievous, no one takes themselves seriously. How pleasant in a year that throws everyone back on themselves.

In a furious autofiction, Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid exhorts the freedom of art in his homeland: In ›Ahed's Knee‹ he has his alter ego, filmmaker Y., travel to a remote desert settlement at the invitation of the Israeli government. On site, he is asked by Yahalom, a young official of the Ministry of Culture, to sign a statement forbidding him to speak freely during the event. In the midst of an archaic-looking stone desert landscape, an artist's struggle with his personal and political demons and an authoritarian cultural policy unfolds.