Isaki Lacuesta

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Inspired by legendary painter and writer François Augiéras, a soldier – who believes he is Augiéras – searches for a series of spiritual murals supposedly made by the painter in an abandoned bunker. The renowned Spanish painter and ceramicist Miquel Barcelo (playing himself), whose recent work is inspired by Augiéras, soon joins in the search as well. The film’s numerous doublings, conundrums, and sexual innuendos reflect Augiéras’s innovative art and troubled life: “The best way to escape from your pursuers without leaving any trail is to walk backwards over your own footsteps.”Read More »

Named after legendary flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla’s groundbreaking record album (which, in turn, was inspired by the works of Andalusian poet, Federico García Lorca), Isaki Lacuesta’s The Legend of Time melds the improvised encounters of Johan van der Keuken’s ethnographic documentaries with the quotidian intimacy of Mercedes Álvarez’s El cielo gira to create a understated, yet meticulously observed meditation on grief, identity, and self-expression. Composed of two, self-contained chapters capture the disparate lives of figurative outsiders from Camarón’s ancestral hometown of San Fernando, Cádiz – a gypsy boy, Isra who decides to honor his father’s memory by refraining from singing during the family’s self-imposed period of mourning, and a young Japanese woman, Makiko who leaves her ailing father behind in order to follow in the footsteps of Camarón and learn cante by immersing herself in the culture – the film is also a lucid and thoughtful essay into the inalterable nature of change, resonance, and connectedness.Read More »

In Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon’s Remembrance of Things to Come, a thoughtful and illuminating survey of Denis Bellon’s photo-reportage between the two world wars, the filmmakers provide a framework for the interpretation of Bellon’s artistically rendered, zeitgeist images as prescient, historical documents that, in hindsight, provide an insightful glimpse of the looming, profoundly transformative world events that would unfold at the first half of the twentieth century. However, in this subjective, often arbitrary process of contemporal assignment of the meaning of images, the intersection between logical deduction and extrapolation continues to be amorphous and untenable.Read More »