European premiere
The course of the river Guadalete in Cádiz province, Spain, from the mountains to the sea: a catalogue of landscapes that hide other landscapes, a collection of inter-dimensional gateways (and picture postcards) that blend real action and animation.
A girl-liana climbs a tree. The bare skin of her hands and feet rest on the wood, gripping, embracing. The leg-branch and stem-toe of the foot intertwine, her hair twists into and blends with the branches, her belly button is lost among the holes in the trunks. That which the camera movements gradually construct, which shift from fragments of human to fragments of tree, and the human-tree montage-rhyme that highlights the tactile, the contact, the connection, is the idea of a symbiotic relationship. As symbiotic as might be the relationship between a mother —the filmmaker— and her daughter —the girl Nina—. The tree here plays a very important role: it stores memory. Just like the Super-8, [g1] which also has its own hole-belly button-perforation, which is also slightly scratched —like the bark of the tree, like the knees of the girl—. In fact, what we see are not only images of Nina but also images for Nina and for the tree. They are records of moments of complexity, of those beautiful and fleeting moments like a rainbow[g2] , that want to be stored in the memory, to which access again in the future would be wanted. The film invites us to share some of those bright moments of childhood by following the girl in the wood, like the White Rabbit, (re)learning from her, adopting her way of seeing the world, her sense of touch. And so, the hand with painted nails of the filmmaker will eventually be confused with the hand with painted nails of Nina. Or is it of her as a girl? Thus, she will be able to rekindle childhood memories embodied in family recordings, which will arrive in waves. Like opening a matryoshka doll to reveal a smaller doll hidden inside the larger one: a teenager jumping in the waves, a girl dressed in red looking into the camera, an even younger girl dancing —just like the incessant twitching of the veins on all the excited leaves in the wood—. A free form like a game in which the usual boundaries of plant/human, adulthood/childhood, slowly vanish and in which time itself loses its order. A short form like a story to get lost in before returning to the world of serious looks, to the world of shoes and shoelaces that must be tied. A light form like the notes of a xylophone and playful like a walk through that magical wood of childhood. For those who can see it with the eyes of a child, cinema is a spell.
Frédérique Monblanc