Sunday 5th March 2017, OTHER CINEMA: El cadáver exquisito / Exquisite Corpse (2011, 90min, USA/El Salvador, dir. Victor Ruano). Presented in Spanish with English subtitles. Doors 20:40, Film 21:00
El cadáver exquisito combines documentary, fiction and experimental film-making as it traverses the social and dream landscape of a region struggling between modernity and tradition. A peasant named Juventino, is killed during a fiery nighttime battle, dedicated to purify the city. As he leaves his world in the midst of this ritual he is infused with visions as his own mind attempts to filter and purify his fears and his desires. Juventino’s myths, as torrid and exuberant as the geography, are often more concrete than his reality. The inhabitants aid his journey by performing rituals with the hope of understanding, pleasing and obtaining favors from the beyond. During the day these rituals unleash repressed emotions, which at sundown are liberated into lascivious celebration. His corpse, during the autopsy, unveils something more repugnant than his death, the submission of the living to it. This fantastical collective biography immerses into a dense mythological universe by narrating the life of this being in the process of unbeing, this character becoming this corpse. […Lees verder]
