02/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: Víctor Iriarte makes his feature-length fiction debut with a beautiful and moving form of filmic correspondence toplined by Lola Dueñas and Ana Torrent

Ana Torrent, Manuel Egozkue and Lola Dueñas in Foremost by Night

“This is a story of violence, rage and violence. Someone loses someone; someone looks for someone for the rest of their life. This is my story,” says Lola Dueñas’s voice at the beginning of Foremost by Night [+see also:
trailer
interview: Víctor Iriarte
film profile], the feature-length fiction debut by Víctor Iriarte, which he wrote together with Isa Campo and Andrea Queralt. The movie has been presented in the Giornate degli Autori at the 80^th Venice Film Festival.

The film tells the tale of two mothers bound by a shared past and present. Vera (Dueñas) was unable to take care of her son when she was young and had to give him up for adoption. Cora (Ana Torrent) was told by her doctor that she could not have children, and so she ended up adopting Egoz (Manuel Egozkue), the biological son of Vera, whom he thought was dead. Now, years later, these three characters meet again in Portugal to look back upon and share their life stories.

Split into four chapters, very much in the style of filmic correspondence, the feature is first and foremost a tale of two mothers’ love for their son. By means of the protagonists’ voice-overs, the first two acts and the closing one emerge as love letters from these two mothers, the story of one’s search and vengeance, that of the other one’s fear, and a focus on the personal legacy of them both. Therein lies one of the great triumphs of the screenplay – in deciding to narrate their inner world through their own voices. Through these, we get to know their worries, their solitude, their wounds, the ghosts that haunt them, their desires, their sadness and their secret joys. These voices are what give the film that sought-after tone of a confessional tale, and also enable it, at times, to disguise what it also is deep down: a horror story about an atrocious crime. That’s another one of its major strengths – its smart blend of genres, as it’s at once an intimate drama, a film noir, and also an adventure and a ghost movie, which, by using that personal tale, that central love story, as its jumping-off point, tells of a collective history that took place in one of Spain’s darkest hours.

The third act is the tale of the reunion between these three characters – the two mothers and their son – how they experience this encounter, their questions and their unsolved mysteries. With it, the film also elicits a certain feeling of embarking on a journey, of experiencing loss, of seeking and finding – and, as evoked by the scene in which the images mingle with an excerpt of Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne, it also proffers a canny tribute to adventure stories, to the depiction of the trials and tribulations endured by a bunch of characters, and to stories within stories.

This is all recounted with immense simplicity, authenticity and tenderness, free of unnecessary gimmicks and without any trace of pretentiousness, through tiny details, care and subtlety in the use of visual, aesthetic, textual and audio resources, framing, locations, lighting and music that all drill down to the very soul of the film, as well as two actresses who make their characters seem truthful and human. In this way, Foremost by Night manages to exhilarate us; it’s a moving, beautiful and, at the same time, sad film, a love letter from mother to son and also a fine way to champion the meaning and the importance of storytelling.

Foremost by Night is a co-production between Spain, France and Portugal, staged by La Termita, Atekaleun, CSC Films, Ukbar Filmes and 4A4 Productions e Inicia Films. It is sold overseas by Alpha Violet.

(Translated from Spanish)

Photogallery 02/09/2023: Venice 2023 - Foremost by Night

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Victor Iriarte
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