Last week the Galician filmmaker Lois Patiño (whose first feature film Coast of Death [+lire aussi :
critique
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interview : Lois Patiño
fiche film] won the award for Best Emerging Director in the Cineasti del Presente section of the Locarno Film Festival; who premiered Red Moon Tide [+lire aussi :
critique
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interview : Lois Patiño
fiche film] at the Berlinale Forum; and who won the Special Jury Prize in the Encounters section at the Berlinale with Samsara [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Lois Patiño
fiche film]) attended the first ECAM Forum in Madrid (read more). There, together with producer Beli Martínez (from the company Filmika Galaika), they sought distribution and a sales agent for their latest work entitled Ariel. Shot in April and May last year between the Azores and Galicia, the film stars Irene Escolar (Goya for Best New Actress for Un otoño sin Berlín [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film] and recently in The Girls Are Alright [+lire aussi :
critique
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interview : Itsaso Arana
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bande-annonce
fiche film] and You Burn Me [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Matías Piñeiro
fiche film]) plus the members of the now defunct Galician company Voadora and many natural actors.

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According to the synopsis, the Argentinian actress Agustina Muñoz travels to the Azores islands to perform in William Shakespeare's The Tempest with the company Voadora, but on her arrival in the archipelago, after a strange event on the ferry, she starts to notice some strange behaviour in the inhabitants. Ariel's apparition will guide her through this strange place, where the real and the imaginary, the dreamlike and the spectral, seem to merge in an ambiguous space.

As Patiño himself told Cineuropa, "the project started with Matías Piñeiro (and with the short film Sycorax presented at the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes), but when he couldn't continue with the project I locked myself in a hotel in the Azores for three weeks with the ideas we’d developed, but adapting them to my own interests. With Ion de Sosa in charge of cinematography, plus the context of the location and working with local actors, we managed to create a fantastic energy."

"I made my first two feature films in Galicia, but I’ve always been interested in learning about different cultures. The Azores are especially unique and as The Tempest takes place on an island, we wanted to get into that same state of mind. I also worked with Shakespeare's most iconic plays to make it sometimes comical, including a scene from Othello in a car park or turning Romeo and Juliet into two girls. This multiplied the British author into new realities, into a hypothetical film with such powerful language out of context, feeling how it appeals to us today," he continues.

"The editing of Ariel is practically finished, but the sound design is still to be completed and the process will be brought forward depending on the offers we receive from festivals," the filmmaker states. "Its title alludes to the character in The Tempest, it’s the spirit of the island transformed into wind and sea. Again, there is a dialogue with the landscape in an animist sense from this character that makes us feel nature very much alive," concludes the director, "already completely confident in fiction, which I’ve explored in depth, and I’m immersed in its magic." And already immersed in his new film, a musical about silence, to be shot in the mountains and with Niño de Elche in the leading role and El Viaje Films producing it.

Ariel, with art direction by Cora Patiño, is a film by the Spanish company Filmika Galaika and the Portuguese company Bando à Parte.