Evil spreads
Jorge Sanchez-Cabezudo's debut feature is one of the biggest surprise of this year's Venice Days. In structure and content, La noche de los girasoles [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alina Sigaro
interview: Belén Bernuy
interview: Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo
film profile] is as close as cinema gets to literature. Its chapters form, altogether, a gallery of accurate and subtle portraits the multiplicity of which parallels the complex way the main plot and the many subplots eventually entangle as the actual chronology is gradually unveiled.
This rich diegesis, elaborated by a truly gifted narrator, unfolds, ironically, in a god-forsaken village on the verge of death in the Spanish countryside, Angosto, where nothing, in theory, should happen anymore. in fact, this "Macbethian" chain of crimes is related to the arrival of people from the city. It is indeed a serial killer - whose job is, paradoxically, to sell cleaning devices - who initially starts soiling everything around him.
This being said, Sanchez-Cabezudo soon blurs this impression of a clear cut causality by multiplying uphazard events (of which he is himself in complete control), so much so that in the end, one can only be confused as to what was the initial spark that caused the pot-holers to kill the last inhabitant of a nearby hamlet (thinking he was the one who attempted to rape one of their girlfriends) - was it, for instance, the spiteful boyfriend of the beginning's little revenge that led the nasty killer to drive to Angosto, or the fact that Beni found a cave he needed the pot-holers to explore...?
La noche de los girasoles is a fully-mastered variation on the theme Audiberti explored in "The Evil Spreads" - that is, the contagion of evil - that attracted a large audience in the Sala Perla and ended with warm applause and a series of compliments, most of them duly noting the many references present in the film.
La noche de los girasoles is a co-production between Alta Produccion SL, Backup Films, Fado Filmes /Stop Line, The Film, and Arte France Cinéma. International sales are being handled by French company Films Distribution.
(Translated from French)
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