21/10/2007

Interestingly enough, the RomeFilmFest opened and closed yesterday with films that featured a woman channeling numerous past lives in languages she does not know.

Following Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (see news) Spanish director Julio Medem closed the press screenings with the competition title Chaotic Ana, his first feature since the 2003 documentary The Basque Ball: Skin Against Stone.

Opening with a close-up of a lark’s graceful flight before it is voraciously felled by a falcon, Medem’s latest centres on 18 year-old Ana (Mauela Velles), who gets plucked from her free-spirited existence in Ibiza by a patron of the arts (Charlotte Rampling) and sent to an artistic commune in Madrid. Ana settles in immediately and soon falls in love for the first time – leading to an unexpected and violent confrontation with the chaos buried deep within her subconscious.

Undergoing hypnosis amid talk of men-rapists and women-whores, Ana first rejects what is happening to her but eventually undergoes a journey to find, not the mother of all languages, as in Coppola’s film, but the mother of all the mothers the girl has accumulated over the centuries.

For the director, Ana represents all of humankind. He says he began writing the script from the idea “that we are all made up of all of those who came before us. The falcon and the lark represent those who are stronger and closer to power and those who are weaker and farther from power, and in life we are both. Like Ana, who initially forsakes a deeper journey into her soul to protect her own identity but then ultimately realizes she must be the last link in a long chain, the last soldier."

Released this summer at home to poor reviews, Chaotic Ana is a fully Spanish film and was executive produced by Medem, among others, for Alicia Produce and Sogecine and is being sold internationally by Sogepaq.