By Mónica Delgado

In Pezas imposibles, Lara and Noa Castro realize an immersion to the materiality of bodies inside the water. Through 14 minutes we’re witnesses of the registry of an inverted submerged camera in a lake where two women dance and swim, all times with their head on the surface. This resource of inversion, allows us to imagine the natural terrain of these bodies, the water, while their heads, breathing outside, seem to be subjected to a type of pressure or torture. Thus, the atmosphere that the young sisters create through this kind of new arrhythmic and unreal dance, points to achieve a total abstraction, despite the cuts, in the nine chapters or fragments that look to give a narrative to this freedom of the female bodies under the water.

Pezas imposibles is one of the works of the Sinais en Curto showcase, a classic section in the program of (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico which picks up representative works of  experimental cinema in Galicia. Amidst this diversity, the work of the Castro sisters feels stimulant, especially since they’re really young filmmakers, not afraid of the formal exploration and games of cinema, where the image and sound (drowned sounds or slow pulsations mixed to the silent rhythm of the bodies) propitiate a lecture about the location of women, in a submarine arcade that looks very much like Eden.

Is the place of these women outside or under the water? Pezas imposibles has, in a layer, an intention to narrate this flirting of swimming bodies, making them talk or dance, abstracting the movements to achieve an aesthetic effect, which also works as a lecture on what’s the natural space of these two women, who respond with this life in a limbo, in constant searching.

Gaelic Filmmaker and writer Alberte Pagan’s A Mosca, is another work included in the Sinais en Curto section, part of his “photographic studies” series, where he reanimates a tv ad in 35mm to dissolve its narrative and trace it through interventions in the frame itself, causing the effect of distortion, where the synthetic sound, provoked by the cuts and interventions in the soundtrack, produces the sense of dissolution and impossibility of classic narrative. A fly appears to cause a commotion in the frame and alter the nature of time and linearity of the ad. This presence of the fly will cause random acts, like the surprising irruptions of nature, to achieve the figure of anomaly, or the elements of a mutant film.

In the other hand, in M (Manuel Moldes-Pontevedra Suite 1983-1987), Ángel Santos uses a 16mm Boles to register the work of the late painter Manuel Moldes. A work made for a retrospective expo of the painter in Pontevedra Museum; it shows how Santos tracks a way of production that needs to be taken out of the workshop or the gallery. The first minutes focuses on Moldes’ work, in the use of colors and sandy textures of his pieces, in the emphatic sounds of the spatula, and then we see him opening the door of his workshop, where one can see people hanging around a busy street, like if this “island” of the painter broke its solitude and tranquility in a moment. In its second part, Ángel Santos places us in the preparations of the retrospective in the museum, where workers take paintings, arrange spaces, or where Moldes himself paints the windowpanes of the facade, trying to take this pictorial island to the streets. There’s a scene where we see Moldes’ reflection on the glass as it was a mirror that throws him literally across the street. This is another kind of inquiry about the role of the painter, through the resources that Santos uses in a punctual mode.

Helena Girón y Samuel Delgado’s Plus Ultra, is a fiction where two men, castaways, arrive to an island, carrying with themselves the remaining of what seems to be some colonial ruler. The encounter with a group of women allows for the only phrase in the short film “do you know how to get out of here?” Men trapped in an unknown world. Then, the resources used by the filmmaker, especially the ellipsis, allow answering that question from an allegory. Knowing women in an arcade which they control and define, where the colonist arrives either to flee or disappear. Thus, Plus Ultra can be read in dialogue with other works of witch-like halo of the filmmakers, or also poses a different meaning to the relation of women and their territories, in their contact with nature and their knowledge.

In Martin Pawley and Marcos Pérez’ Fogos, there’s a complete predominance of the dispositif, where the effect of circularity, a kind of fish-eye, proposes the gaze of a nocturnal landscape of fireworks. The circular frame becomes a great eye, where fire and lights in the black sky try to transform themselves in fleeting irises. This alteration of the landscape and panorama, achieved by the union of six GoPro cameras, perceives also the primacy of fireworks in their planned forms, but also allows for space to compose new explosions from this conditioned centrality. This work was originally thought for dome projections, shown here in a non-less attractive, flat version. As a prophecy of a dystopic future, Pérez and Pawley propose an immersion of fourteen minutes in a film theater, to see the forms of the fires, causing a primal force abstraction.

This selection ratifies the stable level of Gallic cinema, which is still one of the most active creative offers in all Spain.