May 2
International Film Forum: THE WINDS KNOW THAT I'M COMING BACK HOME
The Winds Know That I'm Coming Back Home [El viento sabe que vuelvo a casa] (Jose Luis Torres Leiva, 2016, Chile, 102 min) — Presented by Jay Beck & Cecilia Cornejo, Q&A with the director after the screening
'The Winds Know That I'm Coming Back Home is, hands down, one of the most beautiful films of the year, a lesson in film as a dialogue with the world, questioning the relation between the filmmaker and the world: a reflection on how directors' prejudices (and the second-hand prejudices of it spectators) clash with reality; a clash that, if it can be managed, enables the birth of film.
Documenting a trip (not important whether it's real or staged for the film) by filmmaker Ignacio Aguero to one of the islands of the south of Chile, where he aims to track down the legend of a local Romeo and Juliette who disappeared after the impossibility of consummating their love within their community, the film accompanies the filmmaker, who acts as a mediator, protagonist, and interviewer, on an impossible journey toward a place where myth, legend, prejudice, and shattered expectations collide.
Of such humility and overwhelming elegance, of heartwarming humanity, The Winds Know That I'm Coming Back Home is built, as was said by another great Latin American documentarian, Eduardo Coutinho, upon a dialogue that is produced when behind the camera; Aguero tours the island, he organizes castings, chats with the inhabitants, and has a dialogue, and these conversations, based in the difficult art of knowing how to listen, disassemble the preconceived idea that brought Aguero to the island, they dispose of the legend, but go along revealing little by little other realities: long-wrought and still latent racism, a division between Mapuche people and whites, infinite solitude, an ability to live even when living is tough, and slow traditions that are carried out without grand ceremonies.
The camera of Torres Leiva, as was done by Countinho, doesn't seek moments of crisis, but pauses on the apparently light and banal, and lets life flow among the images, while the legend fades. The Winds Know That I'm Coming Back Home is, in the end, a lesson about film, an ongoing reflection about the exercise of power that allows us to film anything, and about the humility required to recognize when we're wrong.' (Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria, Otros Cines Europa)
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