It took me 20 hours to get from Skopje to Valladolid for the 69th edition of SEMINCI (Semana Internacional de Cine Valladolid). I arrived in Valladolid unencumbered. The festival was already known to me. I knew that Spanish production dominates, that one of the most frequent winners of Golden Spike award was the recently deceased Goran Paskaljević (three-time laureate of the festival) and that long-ago, in the year 1965, the film Skopje 63 (Скопје 63) by Veljko Bulajić, which is a portrait of my hometown (Skopje, of course) after the catastrophic earthquake of 1963. wins the main prize – Golden Spike. Of course, I know that Valladolid’s football team is in the Primera Division. When you go anywhere in Spain, expectations are high. Especially when it comes to the sexiest (69th) edition of the Valladolid International Film Festival, popularly called SEMINCI.
The first screening started a little after 12 o’clock at noon. The Calderon Theater was filled to capacity. September Says by Ariane Labed, (France, Greece, Ireland, Germany, UK) was a great introduction to what I expected from this festival. A film shot in informal two parts that tells a story about two girls, sisters, who have a strong connection and where one sister behaves very protectively towards the other. Shot on 35mm, it can be called a film of atmosphere. The next two films, the Mexican-American La cocina by Alonso Ruizpalacios and My Favourite Cake (Keyke mahboobe man) by the Iranians Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha were screened in various cinema halls. The first one in Calderon and the second in Carrion. These screenings were packed too. Alonso Ruizpalacios with his black and white photography shows chaos in one New York kitchen where people of all nationalities work. All with their own troubles and characters. Brilliantly filmed and realized, with a huge dose of (political) engagement, the film will nail you to the chair and leave you breathless. The Iranian film is a drama in which the main characters are older people who will find themselves despite the problems that old age brings, and despite the (political) system that does not look kindly on such a relationship. The audience enjoyed and responded to the film with laughter. Considering that the characters were older, as well as the audience, that’s understandable. After the end of the first day and the packed screenings, I wondered what would happen tomorrow at The Brutalist by Brady Corbet (UK, USA) – a film that is in the center of public attention and can easily be included in the movie hits folder.
The screening of The Brutalist started at 10 am and lived up to my expectations. It was crowded. And the quality of the film lived up to expectations, of course. This movie will remain in the notebooks. The 3,5-hour saga about Laszlo Toth, the fictional father of brutalism in architecture, certainly was a delight. But not everyone can last that long in a movie theater, so an ambulance had to intervene for one viewer with a weaker stomach. Grand Tour by Miguel Gomes (Portugal, Italy, France) followed as well as Stranger Eyes (Mò shì lù) by Yeo Siew Hua (Singapore, Taiwan, France, USA). The former, winner of the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival, impressed with its visual style, while Yeo Siew Hua presented us with a modern film noir, claustrophobic and uncertain until the very end.
The third day started at 9.00 AM in a new, forth, cinema hall. Cinema Casablanca is a real art cinema in the center of Valladolid. The French title Suspended Time, (Hors du temps) by Olivier Assayas is a lighthearted family comedy set in the time of the covid pandemic. The life of my generation (that of the late 1960s) affected me and even though I grew up in socialism, I could recognize many overlaps between my own and the lives of Assayas main characters. And that life of my generation was conveyed in such a convincing way. Two American films followed: Tracie Laymon’s Bob Trevino Likes It and Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. Both won me over. The ease with which the two young directors are explaining their views is unbearable. I think the audience in the packed theaters also enjoyed these witty and emotional representatives of what should be a New Wave of American independent films. Tylers Taormina’s visual style is impressive, his handling with the huge number of characters he works with also. He stated that he “wanted the film to be like a long hug, the kind that gets existential after a while”. I hope that they are directors that we will be hearing more about in the future. The day ended with the Italian Vermiglio by Maura Delpero: an excellent family /melo/drama depicting the end of World War II in a remote Italian village. This film was also an introduction to another movie theater – the Cervantes.
Day four started with The Party’s Over (Fin de fiesta) by Elena Manrique (Spain, Belgium), an excellent film that, through discrete comic elements, talks about the emigrant crisis, but also about the crisis of Western society and its decadence. The clash of civilizations takes place in the court of a rich idler heiress. A great and well executed idea. The Norwegian Armand (La tutoría) of Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel (Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany) and the Spanish Becoming Ana (La mitad de Ana) by Marta Nieto followed. Both focus on the problems of pre-teen children. The first talks about bullying, but also about the manipulation of this phenomenon in modern societies, while the second one refers to gender identity. Too televisional and too educational for my taste, both of them. And it all just led to the grand finale of this festival day: Three Kilometres to the End of the World (Trei kilometers pâna la capatul lumii) by Emmanuel Pârvu from Romania. When a crime story is set in a Romanian village along the Danube canals, with well-designed characters living in the village such as: the village big boss, the village gendarme, the village priest and the parents of a child with a different sexual orientation than desired, you get a must-watch movie.
I started the penultimate day with Alain’s Guiraudie French-Spanish-Portuguese Misericordia (Miséricorde). A quirky psychological thriller that certainly pays homage to the books by Patricia Highsmith and Georges Simenon can be said. Misericordia was certainly one of the highlights of the festival program. The film that opened the festival, There Will Be Dust (Polvo serán) by Carlos Marques-Marcet from Spain followed. A little death, a little choreography and music. Genre that can be placed in the death-music-death drawer if there is such a drawer. Quite unusual, traumatic, scary, depressing, especially for people who still don’t want to come to terms with the fact that the end is imminent. After Close to the Sultan (En la alcoba del sultán) by Javier Rebollo (Spain, France), a rather unusual film that shows the life of Gabriel Veyre, one of the Limière brother’s cinematographers who shot in Mexico and Indochina, later going to the Orient to meet a sultan who longed for the latest technological advances in the West, followed Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest (UK, Germany, Greece, France, USA), which perfectly connected with the ethnological premises of Close that the Sultan. Although Athina Rachel Tsangari does not specify the time and place where the action takes place, one can recognize that it is still a reconstruction of some customs from the Middle Ages in the British Isles. Impressive in every way, Harvest shows us Tsangari’s bravuris ability to create an entire world within one film.
On the last day, the selection fell on four films: Salve Maria by Mar Coll from Spain, the French Wild Diamond (Diamant brut) by Agathe Riedinger, Dag’s Johan Haugerud Sex (Norway) and Chinese Black Dog (Gouzhen) by Guan Huh. Salve Maria introduced us to the problems of young mothers with postnatal depression, and Wild Diamond to the world of young girls – wannabe influencers and participants in reality TV shows. Diamond, another family drama, is showing all the misconceptions I used to have about those people (woman and man), revealing to me that they are also individuals with all the flaws, but also virtues. Sex, yet, by Dag Johan Haugerud took us voyeuristically into the life and intimacy of two Norwegian families. Bergmanly precise and subtle, Dag Johan Haugerud takes us through his story, introducing other characters as a spice to the story. The last movie I saw was Guan’s Huh Black Dog. An extraordinary drama about an unusual friendship in a really unusual situation when stray dogs take over a city from which people are intensively moving out. A film about wrong interaction between humans and nature with few positive examples and hope.
Six festival days and twenty-two films grown in one breath. Praise to the organizers who managed to bring the majority of the authors of the films and to the selectors, not only the official program that I chose to follow, but also all the other, of course, no worse selections. And the biggest praise for the enthusiastic audience of SEMINCI, the residents of Valladolid who came like a river to the screenings and managed to recognize all the film pearls shown on this edition. Of course, the organizers are also “responsible” for that, as they provided a handful of Q&A sessions, press conferences, television presentations, and everything needed for a city to breathe together with a festival. The packed cinema halls show that Valladolid not only has a refined and numerous film audience that follows the film screenings from 9 am until well after midnight, but it also gives direction on how every film festival, and not just a festival, should behave. It is the direction where the presentation and distribution of films should go – how every city should treat cinema. And that gives me great hope to overcome the personal doubts planted and fueled by several adult film authors (recently I read Rajko Grlić who in one his recent discourse talks about the death of cinema), hope brought by the excellent festival program and full screening rooms, and that is that the death of cinema will still have to wait.
Vladimir Angelov
Edited by Savina Petkova
© FIPRESCI 2024