Ivana Mladenović’s Sorella di Clausura is a darkly comic portrait of obsession, delusion, and the strange collisions between celebrity culture and everyday survival. Featuring a fearless performance from Katia Pascariu as the unforgettable Stela, alongside Cendana Trifan and Miodrag Mladenović, the film builds its own mad energy from the very first moments. A bright red title card declares, “If you thought you were going to watch a film based on true events, you are wrong and possibly paranoid,” setting the tone for a story that oscillates between satire, melodrama, and tragic comedy. Adapted from Liliana Pelici’s autobiographical manuscript, the film reshapes her personal testimony into a wild narrative that keeps viewers laughing, cringing, and thinking in equal measure.
Tag Archives: Spain
Visions du Réel 2025 Review: “To the West, in Zapata”
TTo the West in Zapata by David Beltrán i Marí is a contemplative, COVID-era work set against the remote backdrop of Cuba’s Zapata Swamp. It follows a crocodile hunter named Landi and his wife, Mercedes, who remains at home caring for their autistic son while Landi spends long stretches deep in the wetlands. Beltrán i Marí explores isolation, survival, and the rhythms of domestic and environmental life shaped by absence and routine.
Visions du Réel 2025 Review: “Afternoons of Solitude”
Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude is a provocative, and unsettling documentary that explores the ‘art’ of bullfighting. While the ethicality of bullfighting hovers constantly over the film, Serra resists direct moralizing. He offers a raw, sensorial exploration of masculinity, performance, and spectacle, letting the audience sit with their own judgments. It becomes a strange, gorgeous character study of one man, bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, and the hypermasculine, flamboyant culture that celebrates and consumes him.
Cannes 2024 Review: “The Other Way Around”
Jonás Trueba’s “The Other Way Around” is a sensitive, cerebral rom-com that balances humor, philosophy, and meta-cinematic elements and uses the latter two elements to distinguish itself from the genre. The film follows Ale (Itsaso Arana) and Alex (Vito Sanz), a couple on the brink of separation after 15 years together. Trueba’s approach to the narrative is unconventional and refreshing, turning the typical breakup story on its head by having Ale and Alex throw a party to celebrate their separation and repeatedly finding themselves in the same situation.
Berlinale 2024 Review: ¨Memories of a Burning Body¨
“Memories of a Burning Body,” the sophomore feature by director Antonella Sudasassi Furniss where the Costa Rican director once again takes the stage at the Berlinale Film Festival shines with her storytelling prowess. Following the acclaim of her first feature, “The Awakening of the Ants,” for its strong feminist lens, Sudasassi Furniss returns with a narrative that pushes the boundaries of how the internal world of women, particularly those of advanced age, is portrayed in cinema even further.
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