Posted By Robin Menken

Outsider Pictures presents Award-winning Latin & Spanish Film Roadshow, a unique showcase of award-winning Latin and Spanish films that can be viewed either individually or as a 1-week long mini-festival of sorts – of five award-wining films screened at Cannes, San Sebastian, Berlin, Karlovy Vary with 50+ International festival awards between them.

 

The films will screen individually in rotation each day of the week, and can be seen separately or by purchasing a $40 pass to attend all films.  

 

Immerse yourself in the beauty of Latin cinema and a week-long celebration of captivating stories and unforgettable experiences!

 

This unique collection opens exclusively at the Cinema Village in New York on July 19, and the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles on July 26, with more cities to follow.

 

“Creatura”-Catalan filmmaker Elena Martín Gimeno’s unsettling film “Criatura” uncovers the roots of a woman’s troubled and troubling sexuality.

 

This is the second time Gimeno wrote starred and directed herself in a feature film (“Julia Is” 2017).

 

Gimeno and screenwriter, Clara Roquet based their raw, honest screenplay on countless interviews with woman discussing their sexuality. The main reveal is owning woman’s desire, an impulse which makes men, and still to some degree, woman very ‘uncomfortable.’

 

Their brave film, which won Best European Film at the 2023 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, succeeds because  director and lead actress Elena Martín Gimeno is willing to become transparent. 

 

Focussing on specifics of one woman’s life, she opens up the still very necessary dialogue about the inconvenient truth of women’s sexual desire. Men are afraid of women’s desires.

 

We’re habituated to watching sex onscreen, frequently  abusive or misogynistic sex. This is something new.

 

Present day Mila (Elena Martín Gimeno) and her obliging boyfriend Marcel (Oriol Pla) move into a house on the rugged Costa Brava to be closer to his new teaching job..

 

Her grandmother has recently died. Promising to visit soon Mila’s parents Gerard (Alex Brendemühl), and Diana (Clara Segura) move out leaving the summer house to the younger couple. 

 

It's the site of all her childhood summer vacations.

As Mila grapples with her difficulty having sex with  Marcel, the home launches a series of memories. 

 

One night horny Mila initiates sex, luring Marcel away from his book. Marcel gets into it, but Mila stops him to stare fixedly into his eyes. Again and again. He gives up. What does she want?

 

The next morning she's covered with hives.

Since childhood she's suffered this hive reaction.

Her only relief is her mother bathing her in healing sea

water.

 

It's apparently business as usual, a frustrating cycle of seduction and rejection. Mila desires, her body rebels.

Marcel withdraws from the psychological whiplash.

 

Marcel leaves. He's gone all night, supposedly hanging with his boys in Barcelona.

 

They have dinner at the local bar-restaurant. The hunky waiter Pero (David Menéndez) warmly greets Mila, too warmly. Marcel complains, “I’m pretty sure he was looking at your tits.”

 

Unhappy Mila calls her childhood friend Aina (Cristina Colom), to meet her at the woods where they used to hang out. The two laze on the beach talking. it’s night. Mila gets drunk. They goes to the bar. Joining an after hour party. Dancing. Pero’s a sexy dancer. She flirts with him till he accuses her of regional tourism.

 

Later, still turned on by her brush with the waiter, she provokes Marcel into role play. “Would you like to be fucking a stranger? Say yes.“ The sex heats up until she mentions the waiter. Marcel can’t handle it.

 

Spurred by frustration and memories lurking around every corner in L'Escala's beaches, Mila begins an investigation of her trauma all the way back to early childhood.

 

Rather than elliptical flashbacks, Gimeno handles each memory like a stand alone dream vignette.

 

The middle flashback reveals Mila (Clàudia Malagelada) as a 15-year-old girl. 

 

Egged on by her more experienced best friend Aina (Abril Álvarez) Mila explores her burgeoning sexuality. Aina flashes her bra to an internet voyeur and the two of them watch the guy masturbate online.

 

Promiscuous Aina’s adept at staying out late and brings Mila along. Succumbing to peer pressure, Mila pretends she’s not a virgin, apes the boys’ crude jokes and is blackmailed into giving a hand job to her first “encounter.”

 

It’s a crash course in pleasing men and avoiding expressing her own needs. Acknowledging her urges, she figures out how to do both. But not without triggering her lifelong hives

 

In an provocative scene she lays under the moon while three prowling boys have her en masse. 

 

The idea of her sexuality making men uncomfortable is expressed all over the film.

 

When Mila’s push-pull sex gets too uncomfortable Marcel goes back to Barcelona and her parents visit, to comfort her.

 

Her father is uncomfortable with her. Mila tries to put her head on his shoulder, he finds and excuse to break way. She asks him if they been physically affectionate. He’s stumped, as if his memory, too, is suppressed.

 

Mila’s shame-fueled physical expression acts the same way on her boyfriend and her father: they run.

 

Flashback of early childhood investigate the source of shame. Used to abusive tropes, we expect the worse,

but Gimeno expresses something fresher.

 

5 year-old Mila (Mila Borràs) adores her father (Marc Cartanyà ). Like a flower turning to the sun, she clings to him in the ocean.

 

Mirroring a couple on the beach, she him to rub her bum. Soon both he and her mother (Carla Linares) affectionately rub her bum, thinking nothing of it.

 

She won’t let mama tell her a bed time story. Only poppa. Luxuriating in his attention she rolls onto her tummy and waits for her bum rub.

 

“My Vulva is bouncing” she innocently proclaims to anyone who will listen. Seemingly in denial, the adults ignore her masturbatory explorations.  

 

At a family lunch, she jigs up and down on her father’s knees. Distracted he passes her to her uncle’s lap, until her jiggling and squirming unnerves her uncle.

 

Climbing onto her parents bed in the morning  Mila wiggles onto her dad. “I want to see you naked” ‘Stop bothering your father” Mother says.  Disgusted, her furious dad gets up. “That’s not right. You’re hurting me”, he says slamming the door.  

 

We now know that children discover their genitals very early. They explore and pleasure themselves but it has no sexual connotation until closer to puberty.

 

Mila’s parents are unprepared. Dad’s fury, and his withdrawal from her, is the shaming incident underlying her sexual dysfunction.

 

We meet three Milas. Adult Mila whose unknown trauma stops her from sexual fulfillment, 15 year-old Mila, whose coming of age performative sex teaches her to detach from people’s opinions, and rambunctious 5 year-old Mila, who natural instincts are truncated by shaming from her loving but clueless parents.

 

“Sica”-Documentary director Carla Subirana’s first narrative feature, Galician-language “Sica” is a powerful VERY site specific drama tentpoled by a strong performance by young non-actor Thais García as Sica, a 14-year-old girl who’s lost her fisherman father in a recent tragic accident.

 

Sica and her mother Carmen (Núria Prims) live in a small fishing village on Galicia’s remote wildly beautiful 

Costa da Morte.  Located at the ‘corner’ of Galicia it is the most Northwestern region of Spain, known for its dangerous submerged rock shelves, steep cliffs, traditional fishing villages, lighthouses and a wild  ocean. 

 

The history of shipwrecks stretches from time immemorial to today. More than 600 shipwrecks have been documented in this area, one of the most dangerous coasts in the world.

 

All the men on her father’s small vessel died except Julio (Toni Porras). Leda (María Villaverde) loner Sica’s neighbor and best friend also lost her father. To make matters worse Carmen gets a widows pension, but Leda’s mother, Aurora (Mercedes Martelo) does not.

 

In the opening screen authorities give up searching for the bodies, infuriating stubborn Sica (named for Princess Nausicaa who saves Homer’s half drowned Odysseus when he washes ashore on her island.)

 

She's suspicious of Julio, the survivor who avoids all her questions. Over the next days, and at a wake, she catches glimpses of something off, some secret that even her mother seems to share.

 

Their village is cut off, Its economy entirely dependent on the dangerous waters, now transforming by Climate Change. Like all isolated enclaves, the villagers live with suspicions fueled by local myth and superstitions.

 

Sica still hopes the sea will dredge up her father’s body and visits the Furna das Grallas, a cliffside dark cavern open to the churning sea where, according to local legend, seamen’s souls whisper to their loved ones. She tells her mother she heard his voice.

 

In the beginning the local myth comforts her, connecting her to her childhood home. By the end, when Carmen hears his voice in the Furna das Grallas, seasoned Sica calms her mother, “Its the wind.” 

 

In desperate denial, Sica's hopes vear from him still being alive to needing closure when his body is recovered. She won’t give up her search.

 

Thais García has a sort of feral grace and the jolie-laide features of a young Magnani. She prowls the coastline cliffs, minuscule against the dramatic backdrop. Known as “Roadrunner” for her wellie boots, she’s ridiculed and gossiped about by her schoolmates. But Sica lives on another plane: the universal realm of myth.

 

Sica is approached by Suso (non pro Marco Antonio Florido) AKA ’Stormchaser’, who has an uncanny connection with nature. Measuring wind speed he predicts the arrival of Ophelia, a super storm, within three days, “a great wave will return everything to the earth that doesn’t belong in the water.”

 

The next time they meet Suso explains, “It’s a warning. There will be more storms and different than before.”

 

Sica imagines Ofelia may shake loose her father’s body. 

Susa tells her that only “the Portuguese” a mysterious loner who lives high above the village, can dive that location and find her father’s body.

 

Sica needs his help. The two outsiders bond. He takes her to the Portuguese’s hut.

 

In one ecstatic scene the teens shout at a roiling rain cloud. It’s ominous, hypnotic as it curls across the lowering sky like something from a painting by Constable or Turner. CHECK

 

The bodies of the fishermen have not been recovered.

Carmen begins to plan to leave the village, beset by debts, she needs to work and her brother, who lives in Barcelona offers them a home and chance of a job for Carmen where he works.

 

Loyal Thais refuse to leave until her father's body is recovered and properly buried.

 

A body is recovered, supposedly her father, but with the history of the men wearing each other's jacket, it's very possibly Aurora's father's corpse.

 

Subirana lets the environment speak as a character, with poetic restraint and the documentarian's trust in place and behavior, glimpsed actions and silences infer her story.

 

The opening shots are of Sica under water, floating among the algae, at home in the sea. The ensuing story, flowing by like water and clouds, is a unique coming of ager, about a young girl betrayed by the sea making peace with her home the treacherous fishing village made ever more dangerous by Global warming.

 

DP Mauro Herce’s grainy 16mm photography captures the seductive force of the wild coast . He directed the almost silent immersive Dead Slow Ahead (2015) about a freighter at sea, and won a Goya in 2019 for Fire Will Come (O que arde) Óliver Laxe's drama set ina traditional village. Second unit DOP Anna Molins's work also shines, in a film where the director prided herself in assembling a crew with many female department heads.

 

Xavi Font’s  delicate score mirrors the sounds of fog, the now iconic song of whales, wrapping the film in its 

sea-borne melancholy.

 

Subirana has made a film that’s a hybrid of her documentary experience and a narrative, peopled, as in Neo-Realism, by a superlative cast of non-actors. The two pros are Núria Prims (playing Carmen) and Lois Soaxe (Playing the Portuguese.

 

"The Punishment" - Matias Bize’s single-take drama “El Castigo” AKA “The Punishment” premiered at the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in 2023

 

Reminiscent of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless (2017), the intense three hander is gripping.

 

As the film begins Ana (Antonia Zegers) and husband 

Mateo (Nestor Cantillana) park in the middle of Bosque de Qullin, a dense Chilean forest.

 

They expect to see their seven-year-old son Lucas standing by the road where they left him just minutes before during a heated argument. They search though the forest yelling his name with more and more urgency but no Lucas.

 

While Mateo searches Ana calls her mother and acts as if she’s talking to Lucas, unwilling to admit they’ve lost their son.

 

It’s growing darker and Mateo insists in calling in the police to help look for him, despite Ana’s warnings.

 

A few minutes earlier, while driving through the forest to grandmother’s house, Lucas acted up. Arguing about whether he could play on his pad, he leans over and covers driver Ana’s eyes, nearly running them off the road. Enraged she drops him off and drives away. By the time they drive back, Lucas has vanished.

 

Ana warns Mateo that if they tell the authorities they left the boy at the side of the road, even for a few minutes, they could lose custody.

 

A policewoman played by Catalina Saavedra ("The Maid") arrives and explains that a squad of police with dogs will be there in 10 minutes. She orders the couple to stay out of the forest so their scent doesn’t confuse the sniffer dogs.

 

Ana is a strict mother, Mateo is more permissive and doting.

 

The couple lie to the police woman, explaining that Lucas went to pee and just disappeared. Each of them describe the boy’s personality differently

 

The policewoman warns that if the boy had a fight with them or ran away, they would have to extend the search to the roads.

 

Noticing several sets of tire marks braking, she calls the parents over. The couple eventually divulge the truth.

 

“Did you see any other cars?” she asks… someone who could have kidnapped the boy? The mother saw a car “she believed was red”. The father panics.

 

Ana does everything for Lucas, a rebellious troubled kid suspected by his teachers of having ADHD. He causes problems at home and at school. Ana’s been taking him to the hospital when his anger kicks in.

 

While waiting for the police dogs the couple talks.

Ana confesses a guilty secret based on a life of raising a difficult boy she never wanted, allowing Nestor, who convinced her to have a child, to live his detached parental role. She claims to be a good mother who lives all day everyday for their son while feeling no ‘maternal feelings’. It’s a brutal feminist panegyric as shocking in its way as Whose Afraid Of Virginia Woolf was in its day.

 

Over the 86 minutes first Mateo, than resentful Ana , express their desperate anguish over missing Lucas

 

The film is penned by Coral Cruz, who’s won Gaudi, Iris and Mestre Mateo Awards for previous work. Cruz’s chamber piece, played out in real time rivets like an Albee one act.

 

DOP Gabriel Díaz handheld camerawork, using the slowly fading natural light, increases the tension.

 

Multi-award winning Matías Bize has directed  (“Saturday”2003 and “In Bed” 2005) as well as “About Crying” (2007), “The Life of Fish” (2010), and “Private Messages” (2021). 

 

Antonia Zegers has been seen in "El Conde" (2023) "No" (2012) and "Tony Manero" (2008) by Pablo Larrain, "Chile '76" by Manuela Martelli (2022), "A Fantastic Woman" by Sebastián Lelio, (2017) 

 

Néstor Cantillana has been seen"Historias De Futbol" (1996) by Andrés Wood, "No" (2012) and "Neruda" (2016) by Pablo Larraín, "Cofralandes" (2002) by Raúl Ruiz, "The Memory Of Water" (2015), "The Sacred Family " (2005) and "A Fantastic Woman" (2017) by Sebastián Lelio.

 

Catalina Saavedra has most recently been seen in Problemista (2023).

 

“Lulliby” -(original title “Cinco Lobitos” for the iconic  Spanish lulliby) is an narrative Obra Prima by Basque director Alauda Ruiz de Azua (one of Variety's 10 Directors to track). A humanist who acknowledges her love of Ozu and Kore-Eda, she trusts her camera to watch her characters' every day events with a gaze that is clear-eyed, intimate and forgiving. Jon D. Domínguez's intimate photography centers us in the families emotional surf.

 

Amaia’s (Laia Costa) just given birth to her daughter Ione. Her partner, Javi (Mikel Bustamante), a freelance theatrical lighting designer, has to follow the work to keep food on their table.

 

Amaia is a translator. They are a modern cosmopolitan couple, Madrilenos, each with freelance careers on the rise. They fought the traditional family structure and apparently 'liberated' themselves.

 

But the birth of their daughter unleashes age old gender assumptions they’ve avoided until now.

 

Her parents move in to help with her first weeks,

Amaia’s struggling to get a little rest, trying to feed her baby. It’s not going well. Her stitches hurt. Her breasts hurt, Ione refuses to suckle. Javi and her parents give her endless advice. She's doing everything wrong. She can't get a moments peace.

 

The parents pushy byplay get on the young couple’s nerves and Amaia sends them home.

 

Amaia’s tearful, exhausted but before Javi can kick in as her support system he gets a job offer he can’t refuse. He shames her. He needs the job to feed his family. 

 

Infantilized by his choice she begins to detach from him as a spouse.

 

Amaia attempts to keep her clients, stretching out her “maternity leave” but its a losing a battle. Struggling to manage on her own, she gives in and moves back with her parents for short visit.

 

Her father picks them up. Relief plays on her face as she settles into the back seat of the family car. Home to Basque coast. (Euskadi) Installed in her teenage room, outfitted for the baby, she must once again follow her mother’s strict schedule in exchange for some grand parenting, more rest and home cooked hot meals.

 

Her parents Begoña (Susi Sánchez) and Koldo (Ramón Barea) follow the old way, the inheritance of Franco's Falangist ideology. Women work at home, are punished for adultery and no divorce. (Though divorce was legalized in 1981, Basques are slowly being integrated into modern mores.) Wives are expected to do all the housework and child-raising. Men are catered to. 

 

The Basque response to Franco's laws was to grow Super Matriarchs. Begoña's the powerful Basque matriarch, Koldo, the husband who ‘defers’ to her in order to have all his needs met and secretly does what he wants. 

 

Back at home Amaia re-lives her parents' battle of attrition. Begoña smashes plates rather than hit Koldi.

 

In the house Begoña orders her about like a child.

In town, she dotes on Amaia, showing off her grandchild to the locals. In town they meet Iñaki (José Ramón Soroiz). He's very attentive to Begoña. Eventually mother confesses to daughter that in her loneliness, she had a long affair with him. Koldi avoids him.

 

Loathe to go back to Madrid and begin raising her baby alone, Amaia stays for months, Javi makes short visits. 

He wrangles with her dad, sucks up to Begoña and displays his inability to parent. His liberal veneer erodes. Amaia considers separation.

 

Suddenly Begoña collapses. She's hospitalized, has surgery. It becomes clear she's in her last days.

Koldi and Amaia care for her. The text of the family's love becomes clear. Its a sudden coming of age, as Amaia becomes the caregiver. Once Begoña dies and her father is settled with a housekeeper, Amaia's experience caregiving allows her to move back to Madrid with Javi. Nothings resolved but she's assumed her adult strength.

 

“You Have to Come and See It”- Jonás Trueba’s sensual filmic essay on man’s current dilemma, is an existential  Tapas crawl.

 

A Jazz club in Madrid: As Spanish jazz musician Chano Domínguez plays his Pandemic era composition “Limbo”,  Santiago Racaj’s camera lingers on four young people at a table.

 

There’s captivated bespectacled Elena (Itsaso Arana),  her fidgety partner Daniel (Vitor Sanz), darkly intense Guillermo (Francesco Carril), nodding away to the tune, and his partner fond Susana (Irene Escolar), who is enjoying the company as much as the music,

 

The couples go back years, separated by Covid and Guillermo and Susana’s recent move to the country.

Warily reconnecting after a long break in seeing each other, Guillermo and newly pregnant Susana invite the other couple to visit…”You have to come and see it” they say of their house and settled lifestyle. “It’s a short train ride away

 

Later, in bed over books Daniel ironizes. “You have to come and see it” usually means it won’t happen, or implies a sly put down to their less settled friends. 

 

The flow of the conversations throughout are naturalistic, apparently workshopped by the actors.

The rhythm resembles mid period Rohmer, but as the film goes on it becomes apparent that the content is more spiritual.

 

Six months later Elena and Daniel are on the train from Madrid while Bill Callahan’s gentle “Let’s Move to the Country” plays, underscoring the Spanish countryside flowing past.

 

Midway through a missed connection, a house tour, an al fresco dinner, a game of pingpong and a leisurely walk through the local meadow, the meat of the film comes out over their home cooked lamb dinner.

 

Elena’s comment about “modern man’s drama

who thinks like a vegetarian but acts like a carnivore”

leads to a discussion of Peter Sloterdijk’s monumental “You must Change your Life.” 

 

The title is the last line of a Rilke poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo”. Elena explains that while Rilke contemplated the torso in a museum “he could sense its completeness from from its incompleteness, that the imperfection may be more perfect than what is perfect.” Susana, chimes in “as if the statue was looking at him.” 

 

“Yes”, Elena explains “some pieces of art seem to be more alive than we are and they can speak to us in a very intimate way through time.” 

 

She goes on to explain that art has lost its power, that now only nature speaks to us through catastrophes, pandemic, Climate crisis… “the only things that can make us feel that things cannot go on like this.”

 

Daniel tries to explain Sloterdijk’s theory of Anthropotechnics -that the human race immunizes itself from the dread of dying through sport, creating art, meditating- activities which have replaced religion to help us transcend  our fear of dying.

 

In a Godardian self referential flourish the film stock morphs to grainy Super8. There’s Trueba, directing, the actors breaking character to hang out, the entire crew, who eventually continue the sensual walk through the  meadow, carrying the tools of their trade, As Elena intones “The real: beings, the world.  The real: nothing but knowing the real. Impressions dialogues and tracks. Experience and the memory of experience. Feeling. Knowing.”

 

That’s Trueba’s brief for his seductive fragmentary film.

 

Latin & Spanish Film Roadshow plays from July 26-Aug 2 at the Laemmle Monica 1332 2nd St, Santa Monica, CA 90401