I Lit the Fire!
Spanish premiere.
Introduction and Q&A with Abdellah Taïa (filmmaker) and Antonio Miguel Arenas (film programmer).
I Lit the Fire! creates a link between a filmmaker who migrates from Belarus and a ten-year-old girl from a southern village in Kyrgyzstan. Through fragments of their lives, invisible ties are revealed that connect fears, hopes, and longing for home.
I Lit the Fire! is a film permeated by a radical implication. The camera is not placed at a distance nor does it observe from the outside, but rather it functions as an extension of Valeria Lemeshevskaya's body. Filming is about being inside, exposing oneself, sustaining what happens without hiding behind the device or seeking a false neutrality.
As the film unfolds, its restraint is revealed as a construction made up of layers that overlap and affect one another. Personal experience, political context, and cinematic gesture are mutually implicated. Politics are not articulated as discourse. They seep into relationships, into the instability of bonds, and into the place that the bodies occupy, especially that of the girl. Childhood does not function here as a refuge or a soothing image, but as a space in which fragility becomes visible and where the tensions of the narrative are concentrated. Based on this vulnerability and her own experience, Lemeshevskaya constructs a film that speaks from the body and carries a powerful emotional charge.
Ekhiñe Etxeberria
In the same program
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