One, a member of the Critics’ Jury of the 26th edition of the Malaga Festival, left each of the film sessions as Mary Shelley after the death of her husband. Looking for jurors to yell at them: “Where are you, Shelley? I want to know the truth. Where are you? When are we going to meet?” It is not difficult to find consensus in an NBA game, a song or a novel. It doesn’t cost much to hand over their dead to each side so they can be buried and sign peace or, if anything, an armistice. But that doesn’t happen easily with football or movies. Perhaps it is the dimensions of both disciplines. Too many people playing, a field of play, huge stands, the vicissitudes impossible to foresee, where you decide to explain or count, search or defend. Too many opinions and too much money. Too many heads, feet and hands in a great show, which, on the one hand, makes the final result unpredictable: excellent, horrible, bland, correct or interesting. And even when The Apartment, The Spirit of the Beehive or the last World Cup final is achieved, that perfection is contemplated from bewilderment and senseless devotion. But Erice and Guardiola continue to be questioned and always will be.
In these ten days of the Malaga Festival, after the sessions, I looked for my fellow jury members, other juries, the Official Jury, the Public Jury, the Short Film Jury, the Animation Jury, because in the Malaga Festival there are many juries and awards because the very absence of trying to explain the city of Malaga in a monolithic way makes it a festival with an open and self-conscious vocation. That it has sought to be a bit of everything without ceasing to be anything, bringing the festival closer to the city and the city to the festival and avoiding the sensation of other film festivals that seem to see the Royal Court come to visit the common people. Its director, Juan Antonio Vigar, always emphasizes that talent, everyone you want, but also muscle in the industry. Perhaps because of all this, Málaga is barely going to hold its own in the Second Division and many films in Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Basque have been seen and awarded here for years now and they insist on wanting to reward the greatest works for this amazing game that is to make a movie.
That is why it is inevitable to look for a look, an indication that to the other, to your partner, your brother, your equal on the jury, the film seems the same as it does to you. Being a rookie in these fights, I was a loudmouth the first days and the first sessions. While the rest, like devious poker players, kept gestures, words and grimaces to each other, I was like Mary Shelley: “Where do we meet?” With the days you also frequent critics, producers and journalists, all with their accreditation and their sleepy face and I learned not to be the first to speak. From this edition –I anticipate that of the twenty films, I only wanted to burn the Albéniz cinema on one occasion–, I return with the conviction that the critic Enric Alberó and I are twin brothers who separated us at birth. And well they did. As in the song by The New Raemon, you talk to me about mattresses, I overwhelm you with songs: I am Simon, you are Garfunkel. Everything I liked, he hated. And vice versa. All is all.
Two dozen feature films in the official section at a rate of three a day, like doses of apiretal when our children have a fever. The example is not trivial. Because of sons and daughters, daughters with mothers, daughters and sons without but, at the same time, with fathers absent, dead, escaped, abducted or on a mobile screen we have had a good beating. Also some dodgy men, but already like songs from summers past. Maternities like stuffed animals with pins. Many strong and sensible grandmothers who are always hanging laundry on roofs and having caught the roll of life, now that they are running out. People screaming in tiny kitchens as if they were made for it. Village houses as a refuge, paradise and cave place but with Wi-Fi, a film in a forest with a great sequence shot, but I have to see what that sequence shot is, a Mexican director with an excellent film that would be brutal if nobody had seen it formerly Paris-Texas, bees, poor people who are only cool for those in the cinema if they appear in the cinema, very little sex and, attention smokers: do not lose hope in lung cancer because cigarettes return to the cinema.
All this and a lot of bits of representations of life, heartfelt tributes to Agustí Villaronga, Blanca Portillo and Carlos Saura, as well as the exciting and luminous work by and for Carla Simón who, as in her films, says simple, but says everything. Few comedies, one coarse and two fine and well told that Enric did not like and made me want to be a Basque and an architect or an Argentine, old and a tango fan before the suspicion that in Catalonia when we seem to smile makes us seem less profound and, maybe still alive.
A daily film binge that I already miss in an essential festival to build the future of the industry. In the Official Selection, it won 20,000 species of bees, but as the Critics’ Award we gave it to the Uruguayan, Desperté con un sueño. Because of what it says, how it says it, because of how well placed the fragile scaffolding on which it is supported is and because we liked that it will not be built by gloating and making the sore bigger, but towards the light, life.
Don’t miss it if they premiere it. Nor does the dance begin. Neither Rebellion or Red Shoes. Or Matria or Such a simple life. Or arrival. Actually, I’m stopping here because they are going to discover the only one that neither I nor Enric Alberó liked.
