While our previous Ibero-American program focused more on political themes and observed the (r)evolution of a region that decided to break with the capitalist and feudal 'ancien regime' and its military juntas, this second one is more relaxed and focuses on romance and the small stories of ordinary people, their love triangles and relationships.

Whether we call it 'Ibero' or 'Latino', this is a program of films that cannot be precisely defined. It is some sort of a pulsing but complex laboratory that connects the two continents (Europe and South America) and two languages (Spanish and Portuguese). But their sensibilities are utterly diametric. A-league festivals prefer the 'Latino' variant and there is scarcely a region left unexplored, except maybe Ecuador and Paraguay. While our previous Ibero-American program focused more on political themes and observed the (r)evolution of a region that decided to be done with the capitalist and feudal 'ancien regime' and its military juntas, this second one is more relaxed and focuses on romance and small stories of ordinary people, their love triangles and relationships.

The Brazilian segment consists of two films, Romance by the almost anonymous Gael Arraes and O casamento de Romeu & Julieta by the playful and tanned Bruno Barreto whose lascivious film opus in his most successful phase gave us two ladies from Amad’s Bahia, Gabriela and Dona Flor, whose sensuality later disappears like a soap bubble -- or rather a soap opera. Both authors deconstruct two quintessential romantic couples and combine high literature with the trivial. Barreto’s film evokes the literary as well as Hollywood classics, while his frenetic verbal gymnastics owes a lot to Preston Sturges. Barreto’s protagonist is such a big soccer fan that he gave the nickname Julieta to his girlfriend, not in honor of Shakespeare’s tragic heroine but as a combination of the abbreviated name of the soccer player Julinho ('Juli') and 'eta' that alludes to his co-player Echevarietta. Romeo is the man she falls in love with even though he does not support the same team. On the other hand, Arraes’s protagonists are in love and putting up the play Tristan and Isolde, even though Isolde soon realizes that she can earn better money acting in costumed soap operas (film within a film).

“In romances, love means suffering”, says one of Arraes’s characters, the theatre director. Genial Spanish director Benito Zambrana (Solas) portrays love as the calm and small gestures of a mother whose knitting needles are constantly working, but who is always ready to freshen up her daughter’s apartment with a bouquet of flowers. When Zambrano talks about generations of Spanish mothers torn between the barbarism of the Old World and inhuman urban anonymity, Loach-influenced Achero Manoso (El Bola) confronts two different paternal models (the tyrannical father as the pillar of a traditional family vs. an unconventional father who owns a tattoo parlor). Zambrano’s film includes a character of a mother who travels from the provinces to visit her daughter; Chilean Shai Agosin (El Brindis) introduces the character of a daughter who visits her sick Jewish father.

The Portuguese segment ensures an additional dose of Ibero-American medley. Luis Galvao Teles uses even the title of his easy-going film Tudo isto e fado to refer to the musical opus of the legendary Amalia Rodrigues; half-crazy Shai Agostin in tandem with the co-screenwriter Olivier Assayas, whose collaboration was the result of a fifteen-day long Parisian friendship, flirts with the almost identical Brazilian Arraes’s combination of theater and soap opera. The only difference is that in the Portuguese film Tristan and Isolde are replaced by references to Electra, Clytemnestra and Orestes. Thus, life is a theatre. (Dragan Rubeša)