Spanish Film Festival

How to start writing about two films based on polarities – life and death, past and future, childhood and adulthood, loss and hope – that grip your stomach, squeeze your heart, and make you both weep and laugh? I’ll start from a quote by Albert Einstein: ‘The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.’ ... (read more)

Given how commonplace it is in today’s economy, where are our great films about solar power? I’m not thinking here of those countless disaster and science fiction films that feature a dying sun or volatile solar winds as catalysts for global catastrophe, but simply movies that would give life to the otherwise unremarkable solar panels tilted skyward on roofs and farms around the world.

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You are camping with friends, drinking beer and swimming, celebrating your nineteenth birthday. A car pulls up in the forest. Your aunt emerges, and as she walks towards you she calls out, palms pressed as if in prayer. In Spanish filmmaker Icíar Bollaín’s gripping Maixabel (2021), it is enough for a relative to say your name to know that the worst has happened: your world has ended, your father has finally been slaughtered.

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