14/11/2013 - Ramón Salazar world-premieres his comeback after 8 years writing scripts; a high voltage emotional movie, and a risky career shift

Expectations were raised when the Malaga-born filmmaker, who gained attention with Stones and 20 centimeters [+see also:
trailer
film profile], announced his new work. The Seville European Film Festival’s official section has welcomed Ramón Salazar's troupe (alongside Lola Dueñas and Susi Sánchez as headliners), displaying all of their glamour all over the Lope de Vega theatre, where 10.000 noches en ninguna parte [+see also:
interview: Ramón Salazar
film profile] was screened (still awaiting a distributor).

Spanish blockbusters 3 Meters Above the Sky [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Tengo ganas de ti [+see also:
trailer
film profile]’s scriptwriter isn’t looking for a commercial success with this film he wrote and produced (alongside Roberto Butragueño) after making it to his forties. On the contrary, the filmmaker’s maturity bets high on a risky narration and a deconstructed structure; a film effort where experimentation, improvised acting and personal experience get together without any boundaries to limit them.

In order to do that, Salazar works from Andrés Gertrúdix’s innocent, mysterious and a little scared gaze, in serious competition with Ana Torrent for the prize for Spanish current cinema’s most expressive eyes. The actor plays an unnamed young man –credited as The Son- who’s about to start a physical and emotional voyage in search of his fate and his place in the world. Shot in Madrid, Paris and Berlin in inverse order of the one the screen shows, this hypersensitive pupil youngster will have to handle an absolutely dysfunctional family, to try to get back his lost childish eagerness and find his place in what’s to become his new, completely unorthodox family.

But Salazar, also responsible for the widely awarded short film Hongos, is not making clear what we’re staring at: it can be reality, a dream, or the result of Gertrúdix’s character’s imagination - a hellish nightmare or a fairy tale. By skipping conventions – as Claudia, an artist played by Najwa Nimri, does –, the filmmaker takes the leap and wagers on freedom in each frame of this film – a film which he has been working on for the last three years in order to restart his career.

That’s the main reason why the film’s time jumps help to blur any logical structure, trying to make us stay away from rationalization and let the door open for our deepest-buried emotions. In the process, Salazar reminds us how erratic our destiny is, how the chosen paths are as decisive as the non-chosen ones and that, even if we shift stages, we’ll never escape from ourselves – that baggage we will always carry.

(Translated from Spanish)