When you are looking for new sensations in the Christmas card, you can change the predictable fantasy of Avatar: fire and ceniza for two good head turns: Balearics, by Ion de Sosa (San Sebastian, 44 years old), and Ariel, by Lois Patiño (Vigo, 42 years old). Friends and collaborators, the owner and the gallego defend their own voice in the Spanish cinema of renewed author. A label that we both adopted. “Why don’t you apply as a film of these Navidades? Once the euros seem very cheap to me for what you are going to take when you are ready to see them”, says De Sosa with his usual humor, aware of his battle against Goliat. “And there is also something fantastical, which opens up a parallel imaginary universe,” says Patiño.
Nadie better than them at selling them. In order of arrival: Balearics, ya in room, was preceded by applause at the Márgenes festival, where it received the audience prize and a special mention from the jury. Like so many important works, it has polarized critics: it irritates some and fascinates others. De Sosa presents one of them for one, empathy as a survival horror juvenile to integrate another film, which illustrates the threat of this bourgeois adult world and delivered to a moral anesthesia in the manner of The exterminating angel. The impending disaster, alethargado under a blinding summer landscape, mana of the dark influence of the swimming pools, symbolic portal which connects the two tragedies. “There is an intergenerational reading: you wanted to die to be the person you are now. During my meetings with producers, I decided that at 18 you want to change the world and at 40 you want a swimming pool”, says its author, who pleads for denaturalized dialogues and dry sarcasm to generate even more extrañeza. “I’ve been told that it makes me shy to show feelings. In my skin, I laugh and if I laugh, I do it in a grotesque way. We try to have dialogues that open up a mystery in themselves, often conclusive.”
In this plural, he refers to his screenwriting partners: Chema García Ibarra (director of sacred spirit), Juan González (from the duo Burnin’ Percebes) and Julián Génisson and Lorena Iglesias (from Canódromo Abandonado). Renovators of cinematographic language to those who join a group of performers on the fringes of the actor’s canon such as the singer Christina Rosenvinge, the post-porn artist María Llopis or Héctor Arnau, former singer of Las Víctimas Civiles.
Movies Share More Than You Can Think About a priori. To begin with, the eye of Ion de Sosa, who also takes magnetic photography of Ariel, by Lois Patiño (her theatrical debut, December 24). In this case, the limbo where the characters live is a Portuguese island where everyone comes from, which is not just the time, to recite the works of Shakespeare. Everything responds to this great theater of the world which is The storm, The most baroque work of the English bard, starting point for this existentialist and sensory comedy with Agustina Muñoz and Irene Escolar. Patiño went to work with the Argentinian Matías Piñeiro, but his collaboration could not be definitive. With funding in the green, he found himself unable to stop it or address it on his own, despite returning to his usual spiritual and contemplative style.
From Costa da Morte (2013) until samsara (2023), in his films “there are traces of souls in the landscape”, as the Portuguese poet Teixeira de Pascoaes sketched. “I tried to practice consistency in my journey, but I always preferred to try to learn, which I didn’t do. Samsara, which was an anthropological documentary, to theatrical fiction, which is sometimes the opposite. See the fiction, but without believing in it. I put a conceptual distance, metanarrative. For me, the ambiguous space between the real and the spectral, or in this case between the real and the fiction, is the most fertile,” he reflects.
Where everything was silence, distance and reflected voices in the cinema of Lois Patiño, there are now dialogues, short shots and the breaking of the fourth wall. Lots of enthusiasm, confidence, working with Ion de Sosa infected him. “I’ve always been shy about approaching both the camera and the characters. It’s wonderful that now is the time to make it part of my vocabulary.” His colleague gives a pragmatic response: “That’s how I always had low assumptions, noise about what I control, their faces. I taught Lois about the intangible, those things that at the beginning I didn’t understand and that I took more time to contemplate. Because I’m more of the type ‘Así, boom!'”.
They coincide in that they are their most ambitious and commercially successful projects. He joined the Locarno festival in 2013. De Sosa is co-producer and director of photography for The future, by Luis Lopez Carrasco. Patino, with Costa da Morte, His first opera, which earned him the prize for best emerging director and placed him as a standard-bearer of the new Galician cinema alongside his friend Oliver Laxe. “We have spent over a decade on the festival circuit, fortunately, with good progress. Our efforts have been to explore the cinematic language to reinvent it and discover new things, but we want to reach other heights, reach more audiences,” they often reason in unison. During the conversation, the news of the appointment of Sirat at the Globos de Oro. “Oliver managed to cross just this barrier. He made a wonderful journey without renouncing his identity and found the public. It is a beautiful mirror in which he looks at himself,” they say.
De Sosa has become one of the most interesting cinematographers in our country. This is what you see Aro Berria, Irati Gorostidi’s stimulating prima opera. And in Filmin están el remake ultra low cost of Blade Runner in Benidorm, titled Sueñan the Androids (2014) and Mamantula (2023), a marvelous delirium featuring an Asian tarantula from space dressed as a human. His feverish activity and his recognitions among professional colleagues contrast with his difficulties in making a living from cinema. At the age of 27, he moved to Berlin. “I was looking for the cheapest capital in Europe at that time. I paid 340 euros for an apartment. I worked very hard for 10 years in a pizzeria. After that, I paid the first three times.” First of all, the autofiction documentary true love, invested 20,000 euros.
This is exactly what it cost Patiño Costa da Morte. “I had the referent of my priests, abstract painters (the creators of the Atlántica movement Antón Patiño and Menchu Lamas). From them comes the temperament do it yourself. He has always done everything: photography, editing… And he looked for artistic creation opportunities and film grants. When I heard one or the other, I decided it was video art or experimental cinema. And always with a philosophy that leads to Godard: if you only have five dollars, there are films that cost five dollars.
Moving to sales
In his meditated business tour, they wait for their next projects. Patiño is working with National Film Award-winning producer María Zamora on her biggest film production, which will take her to the Philippines. “I’m returning to the animist universe, but within a great fiction. It’s something that I don’t dare not be because of the leap into the void that I took on. Ariel: the stage performance, the direction of the actors, the psychological construction of the characters…”.
De Sosa is once again co-writing with Chema García Ibarra something that has been tentatively titled, Devastated regions. “It’s an institute drama where a student hides something dark. And when I say drama, I say it with full conscience, because this time I’m experiencing a linear film. One of the great schools we met Balearic Islands is to find a distribution, because it does not play concrete, recognizable and therefore marketable code at first. He promised to give me a more accessible tour.
About The Author
