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SEVILLE 2013

El futuro: partying through time

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- The Sevillian festival welcomes Luis López Carrasco’s Locarno-screened first feature film, one that looks at the present through fragments of the past

El futuro: partying through time

What’s the present if we look at it from the past? Is it the future, or is it something completely different? Luis López Carrasco, audiovisual collective Los Hijos cofounder, launches his first solo work to try to answer this question. El futuro [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, his first feature film, was presented at the latest Locarno Film Festival, in the out of competition section Signs of Life, and is screened for the first time in Spain at the Seville European Film Festival. López Carrasco’s groundbreaking glance stares at the present - or at that other completely different thing? - through images, songs and fragments of the past. 

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El futuro re-enacts a party night of a bunch of friends in the 80’s – no more, no less. Nonetheless, it does it from a documentary and experimental perspective, and from a far-off place, hence we can’t hear everything the partygoers say because of the music playing. It was during those nights that Spanish society discovered freedom, after the never-ending decades of the Franco regime. Youth, willing to break away from the past and embrace what was about to come, led movements such as the movida, or the Madrilenian scene, but also far away from Madrid, in any other city of the country. López Carrasco gazes at these youngsters, vividly dressed and zealous, who talk about the Americans, drugs, grandmothers and microwaves, ETA’s terrorism, public protests, or even putting lipstick on a Civil Guard; and who break taboos as if it was the most natural thing to do.

El futuro experiments, in 16 mm, with what it portrays: it doesn’t allow conventional narration to take control of it, and it manages to make its meaning clear through its visual concept. The film opens with the speech by Felipe González after he won the 1982 elections, and throughout its course, it undergoes ruptures which establish links with the past, the future and, finally, the absence of everything - time, space or even light. El futuro is, on top of that, a social portrait, a look at the connections between a past time of hope and the current one, which is all about the contrary. Thus the film is a picture of a destruction, or, if preferred, of something completely different.

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(Translated from Spanish)

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