And So the Night Fell, which had its world premiere last week in the Albar Competition of the 63rd Gijón/Xixón International Film Festival (where it won the Best Director Award – see the news), marks the return of Ángel Santos to feature filmmaking, ten years after The High Pressures [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Ángel Santos
scheda film]. Shot entirely in his native Galicia – and with dialogue spoken in Galician and Spanish – it is a talkative (yet also punctuated by long silences), modest and intimate movie with a distinctly independent, existential bent, bordering on the philosophical.

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Led by Denís Gómez and Violeta Gil, who had already headlined the 2021 short Así vendrá la noche (in this urge to broaden the battlefield, it coincides with another Spanish title competing at the same festival, Nothing Personal [+leggi anche:
recensione
scheda film] by Javier Marco), the film shows how Pablo sets up his sculpture studio in a remote rural area on the coast, where he has isolated himself, cutting all contact with friends and family. But when his former lover Andrea returns from Canada and seeks him out, it sparks the need for a new escape in him.

Unhurried in pace, and verging on a contemplative documentary, this fiction connects with the Pontevedra-born filmmaker’s earlier work through its hopeless love of the landscape (to which he devotes long, expansive frames) and its fixation on spaces (a factory, the workshop, a cabin…), through which the characters (barely three of them: to the central couple we add the manager of a campsite, played by Miquel Insúa) drift, possessed by a certain existential romanticism.

Indeed, Pablo doesn’t answer the phone or emails; he is a character outside the margins, a man who has voluntarily chosen to distance himself from everything and everyone. Without going into the reasons for his decision, a protagonist this solitary is unusual to see in contemporary cinema (or in our society), where interconnection, consumerism and productivity are the leitmotif of our stressed-out lives.

And this is what makes this quiet man so fascinating: devoted to his vocation (ceramics), he barely speaks or conveys what he thinks, which creates chaos and confusion among those close to him, always probing the whys of his withdrawn, hermetic, anchorite nature. He's a human being, then, who appears to have travelled through time from another bygone century, because he loves and seeks out solitude, peace and silence, gifts bestowed on us by nature that seem to draw scorn in days of fury and shouting.

With these elements, the film – made by a self-confessed admirer of Rivette, Bergman and Antonioni, and it shows – inexorably unfolds, unhurried and in stripped-back fashion, towards a second half in which absence takes over the narrative and the camera focuses on the central female character, a woman who may also end up embracing the solitude, peace and soothing beauty of the Galician coast.

And So the Night Fell is a production by Maruxiña Film Co, Amateurfilms and Matriuska Producciones.