Finishing touches for Jaime Rosales’ new film
The new film by director Jaime Rosales, entitled Un tiro en la cabeza (“A Shot to the Head”), will be ready within a month, once the post-production work has been completed. It is rumoured that the title will be finished in time to be presented at the Cannes Film Festival, an event that the director has already attended on numerous occasions.
The unexpected but highly deserved success of Solitary Fragments [+see also:
trailer
film profile] at the Goya Awards – where it won the awards for Best Film, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor – have made his latest work one of the most eagerly awaited films of the season.
Rosales – who was born in Barcelona in 1970 – demonstrates once again that he is a bold filmmaker, both in terms of the content of his work and from the point of view of technical experimentation. For instance, in Un tiro en la cabeza he tackles a very delicate subject in Spain – ETA’s terrorism.
The story centres on the latest attack carried out by the group in December 2007, when three members of ETA killed two civil guard policemen in the French town of Capbreton. The event immediately caught the director’s attention, for, as he said in an interview given to the daily newspaper El País: “It wasn’t like the other attacks, in fact it wasn’t a terrorist attack, but a chance encounter, both inevitable and, at the same time, terrifying”.
It took Rosales only a week to write the script and filming began straight away. The 14-day shoot took place in San Sebastián and the French region of Les Landes.
Solitary Fragments surprised audiences with its use of polyvision, but in Un tiro en la cabeza Rosales has come up with another way to impress viewers. “Everything was filmed using telephoto lenses, from far away, and you can’t hear the dialogues", explained the director during the same interview.
In fact, the characters talk, but often the viewer cannot hear what they are saying. This choice stems from a specific idea – to reflect the lack of communication that is rife in society and, particularly in the world of politics, where everybody speaks continuously but nobody listens.
(Translated from Spanish)
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