Spanish kids grow up in San Sebastian
Two local films shown at the San Sebastian Film Festival, currently underway, portray the brusque coming of age of children.
In Agustí Villaronga’s Pa negre [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (“Black Bread”), a young boy, Andreu (an amazing Francesc Colomer), is confronted with the treacherous politics and complicated local allegiances of rural Spain just after the civil war. The Catalan-language film of the El Mar director is spins an intricate web of intrigue that the innocent boy finds very hard to understand and unravel. The film is based on several novels from Catalan writer Emili Teixidor.
The complex, wartime politics-laden story involves the boy’s “red” father, Farriol (Roger Casamajor), who is shunned by most of the village and has to hide after his associate is killed in the spectacularly staged prologue in which a horse and cart are pushed over the edge of a mountaintop. The local head of the police (Sergi Lopez, in one of his rare Catalan-language roles), who still carries a torch for the boy’s mother (Nora Navas), investigates the case, though the film is strictly seen from a perspective very close to Andreu.
The boy has to grow up quickly and fend for himself as he discovers secrets that involve his own family, his family’s past and his own future.
If Andreu is forced to grow up by events he cannot control and struggles to comprehend, quite the opposite is true for the young female protagonists of Elena Trapé’s Blog [+see also:
trailer
film profile], who form a secret club to take their destiny into their own hands. Recorded by and told to a (always moving) camera handled by one of the girls and to the girls’ webcams, the contemporary film is noteworthy for offering a modern and female twist on the secondary-school drama genre. The ending, however, tries too hard to shock with a twist that doesn’t feel credible, especially in the Internet and information age.
Pa negre is produced by Isona Passola for Massa d’Or Producciones, with backing from Televisió de Cataluny. Blog is produced by Escándalo Films. All are based in Barcelona.
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