Candela Varas
In a metaphorical sense, islands and islets may represent temporally autonomous zones, intimate places where the characters meet, take refuge and reveal themselves.
This year we present a set of films that evoke the ambience of summer, bringing its inevitable heat and holidays. In these films we experience that unique temporal suspension from which we have no desire to escape. Suspended and peripheral places can also refer to remoteness and disconnection. Heat is not always synonymous with jubilation. It also warns us of the desertification that is advancing inexorably with climate change. However, each film carves out a unique sense of time and the rhythms of everyday life. Some foreground father-daughter relationships, even of fathers who are absent or have disappeared. Narration of some films is based on memory or focused completely in the present. One of the documentaries seems to be a game, a tropical rainforest providing sonic background. In this film, which was not originally intended to be a film, the cinematographic material is not fixed. Instead, choices are made on the spot as in a game. Next to it, we encounter a documentary that works in complete opposition, drawing on archival material of the great Cape-Verdean singer, Cesária Évora.
But it’s important to emphasize one thing. Such places - of refuge, isolation or enclosure – evoke a female Gothic literary past. Here, in these works, they profoundly shape the characters: women who leave the islands for the wider world with a vigorous drive to embrace life fully.