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D’A 2017

Europa: A hallucinogenic journey to the end of the night

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- The first feature by Miguel Ángel Pérez Blanco is, he says, “like a trip accompanied by an audiovisual experience”, reflecting a continent adrift

Europa: A hallucinogenic journey to the end of the night

Among the films presented as world premieres at the D’A Film Festival, which is in full swing, one title that stands out is Europa [+see also:
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, the first feature by Miguel Ángel Pérez Blanco, which premiered on Saturday 29 April in the auditorium of the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture, in competition in the Talents section. The director previously made the short films Carretera al Atlántico (2012) and Los dinosaurios ya no viven aquí (2014).

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Europa, filmed in the mountains of Navacerrada (Madrid) during an unusually warm winter, is meant to be an audiovisual experience and a kind of hallucinogenic trip, to summarise the description that its director gives. His intention is for the audience to be carried away by the evocative sound work and mesmerising images that make up this film, breaking down physical and temporal barriers. The characters we follow are living through New Year’s Eve of December 2017, which will mark the beginning of 2018, but also the New Year’s Eve of 1999, which signified the end of the last millennium, when some people believed that something serious, immense and transcendent was about to happen.

In the end, nothing happens. Or maybe something does: the world has been invaded by deception, confusion and alienation. All that and more is invoked in every scene of this story, which is entirely nocturnal or shrouded in the early light of dawn. Using an individual story with a minimal amount of drama (a couple gets lost in the woods trying to find the location of a New Year’s Eve rave), the film transmits a feeling that applies to our whole continent. The echoes and flashes of light coming from the party always remain off camera, and the characters carry out a continual pilgrimage, wandering through a dark plain where from time to time men and women appear with whom they experience moments that range from fascination, through camaraderie, to ephemeral passion.

In this way, Europa takes the form of an electronic “loop”, electronica being Pérez Blanco’s favourite genre. The director tries to put the viewer into the same trance as the characters by means of sensations. To do this, he uses slow motion and other visual and sound effects, pixelating, tightening the frame and modifying the colours, to give audience members the impression of being under the influence of the same pills as those that the lovers we’re following have swallowed.

The point of view almost never changes, featuring only one or two reverse shots. The film was shot at the limits of the invisible, and the director let the very experience of filming contaminate it. It required six months of editing, which could have turned into an infinite quest for sensations of all kinds. The result is a film that is sometimes confusing and disconcerting, and which reveals the identity crisis of an entire continent.

Europa is a film in spoken several languages (Spanish, French, English and Russian). It was produced by Zapruder Films SL with the support of numerous small investors as well as ECAM and the regional government of Castile and León. The film’s cast is made up of Alexei Solonchev, Virginie Legeay, Cristina Otero, Roman Rymar, Pablo Moiño and Juan Moiño.

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(Translated from Spanish by Margaret Finnell)

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