Contemporary film festivals look like showrooms of car dealerships. As much as they differ in size and importance, they all share the same rituals. But discovering a new film has become sort of a liturgy



I heard these words from the man who never leaves his hat behind, the genius Jose Luis Guerin, as we walked towards Tuškanac cinema, where he was presenting his film Guest as part of the program Film Mutations. It is an unusual hybrid of a film diary and a documentary, for which he used a small pocket camera to record images and memories during his intercontinental adventure. Namely, he accepted invitations to 42 film festivals in a single year and recorded unexpected encounters during these journeys. Nevertheless, Guest is also a political film, when the author films a Peruvian chocolate vendor and Palestinian children in Jerusalem who are eager to show the filmmaker their demolished school and asking him the film would be shown on TV. The flooding disaster that he experienced at the Mostra in Venice, when Lido was struck by a powerful waterspout, in the end will wash out the film image itself and leave the canvas empty in its whiteness.

That very Mostra was completely indifferent to the impressive work of the Tunisian author Nouri Bouzidi, even though he is one of the most radical filmmakers of the Maghreb cinema today, alongside Tariq Teguia. Bouzidi's Making Of is the only film in this retrospective that was not directed by a Spanish director, but was rather made in Spanish production. That is why it was premiered at Journees Cinematographiques de Carthage where the festival jury, led by the militant Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, presented him with the main award. Indeed, the author's story of a young break-dancer who becomes a martyr and is recruited as a suicide bomber, due to his friendship with a sculptor who makes a living by engraving Koran verses into tombstones, is a fierce criticism of Islamic fundamentalism, which is reminiscent of a Maghreb version of Mad Pierrot.

Other kinds of religious fundamentalism, such as the Christian one, are dissected by the great Javier Fesser (Camino). The film is based on a true story about young Alexia Gonzales, who is suffering from bone marrow cancer, and whose tragic fate is manipulated by dark characters from Opus Dei and her brainwashed mother who forces her daughter to 'offer' her suffering to Christ. However, the young girl is in love with a different Jesus, the one from her school (author's criticism of Christianity owes a lot to Mullan's The Magdalene sisters).

Another serving of terror (this time that of the war) seen through the eyes of an angel-like child, is directed by the icon of Spanish queer Augusti Villaronga whose Black Bread (Pa negre) is too often compared to Pan's Labyrinth. His film is much more immersed in (the cruel) reality and physicality, while its restless camera captures secrets, lies, myths, dreams, loyalties and gossip in the Spanish province during Franco's tyranny (one possible link to Pan's Labyrinth is Sergio Lopez who yet again recycles the character of a Francoesque villain, now in the role of the Mayor). But, just as Fesser's Camino, Black Bread is also a fierce criticism of the Spanish Church that took the side of fascism. The evocative debut of director Paula Ortiz (Crysalis) explores the lives of three women at different historical moments. It is also an elegant chronicle of different epochs of Franco's tyranny - one in 1941 (episode reminiscent of the director Mallick, starring the fantastic Mirabel Verdu who meets her former lover, a republican fighter on the run), and the other in the year of his death (a middle-aged woman in the cocoon of everyday life, waiting to meet the man of her dreams).

Unlike Ortiz, whose Crysalis focuses on three women stuck in a rut, Cesc Gay (Una pistola en cada mano) focuses on eight men at the age of forty-something on the verge of a mental breakdown and going through an identity crisis. Ironically, the pistol in the original title relates to their penises that they are clearly unable to control. The master of insane Spanish comedy Daniel Sanchez Arevalo (Primos) reduced the number of his heroes to three and follows their return to a small town where they used to spend summer holidays as children. Arevalo hired two actors from Almodovar's film I'm so Excited! (Raul Arevalo, Antonio de la Torre) and that in itself is a guarantee for a good laugh. Since this film follows the rhetoric of Hollywood vulgar comedy, maybe we should change its original title Primos to Cojones. (Dragan Rubeša)