THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Argentine filmmaker Eduardo Spagnuolo speaks of his movie ‘Homero Manzi, a Poet in the Storm’ as one that is not traditionally directed, but one ``that tries to show the variety of the poet’s creativity.’’
The movie, which is part of the 14th International Film Festival of Kerala, is a biopic of the poet Homero Manzi, whom Eduardo describes as ``the most romantic tango poet.’’ But the movie is not only about his poems; Manzi was also a political leader, and a scriptwriter for movies.
Eduardo, whose interests include ecology and politics, speaks about the ``irrationality of capitalism, which destroys the place where you have your feet on.’’
``We are destroying our home, supposedly after a series of rational arguments, which are, in fact, quite irrational. But Homero Manzi had his feet on the land, on the social times that he lived in and that is why people care for his poetry as their own,’’ adds Eduardo.
Enrique Angeleri, also from Argentina, is the editor of the movie ‘A Fly in the Ashes’, made by his wife Gabriela David. Enrique, who had joked that his wife was the chief who gave him orders, said that it was an article that appeared in a newspaper that prompted them to make the film. It was about a girl who was captured and kept in a room and forced into prostitution.
What disturbs Enrique is how it could have gone unnoticed when it happened in the centre of the city. ``What about the people who were living around? It means there is no one to look at the circumstances or to denounce it. It is only because this girl escaped that we knew about it.’’
The movie was made to ask the question why such a incident is happening and why there is no one to defy it. The movie intends to find out the emotional ties or the absence of it in relationships. In the film, the characters of the two girls who play the central role are etched in contrasts. ``The one who is stupid finds her liberty, while the intelligent one suffers,’’ says Enrique.
The name of the movie, Enrique explained, comes from a ritual of putting a fly in water, waiting two days for it to die and then consigning it to ashes.
Sachin Kundalkar, the director of ‘Smell’, explained how the story of his film being inspired by Malayalam filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan came about.
``Some journalists kept asking me what inspired me and I mentioned about coming to Kerala and seeing Adoor’s ‘Naalu Pennungal’ at the time I had the concept of ‘Smell’ in mind. So they stuck to the word ‘inspired’ ever since. But it is true that I admire Malayalam movies very much.’’
Sachin wanted to explore the role of smell in relationships, cinematically. ``But making a feature film out of it was no easy job,’’ he says. Having the film included in the IFFK was great ``as the fest proves to be the emigration point of all good films in India,’’ he says.
trivandrum@expressbuzz.com