Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ 2007 film “Silent Light” pretty much blew us away and we’ve been anxiously awaiting the director’s next project. Well, as Bomb magazine reveals, it appears he has a short film and feature length project already in the can.
The full length film, “Serenghetti” (pictured above and below), was specially commissioned by International Film Festival Rotterdam. The festival contacted the director to make a film for their Urban Screens program and the result was a docu-drama of sorts of a soccer match between two women’s amateur teams. The completed film played at the IFFR earlier this winter. Here is the synopsis from their website:
For the Urban Screen project, the IFFR approached three film makers with whom the festival has close links. The Mexican director Carlos Reygadas is one of them. Since his ambitious and widely praised début film Japón was premièred in Rotterdam, his lyrical oeuvre has been shown at the festival. Reygadas (a great soccer fan) made a football film for his urban screen. The game between two women’s elevens takes place on a pitch in the middle of a surrealistic mountain landscape where corrosion has done its job. The game has all elements of a professional match as these are generally seen on TV: colourful club kits, camera recording from all possible angles, statistics, the score, slow motion repeats, a preview, interviews with the players etc. A greater contrast between the daunting mountain landscape and the clean urban façade on which this is screened is almost inconceivable. Add to that the mixture of two almost incompatible worlds – that of commercial football broadcasts on TV and the artistic cinema of Reygadas – and a special viewing experience is born.
It’s abstract to say the least, and given that the film doesn’t exist on IMDB and was created as a special project, don’t expect it in your local arthouse anytime soon. But it does sound fascinating and we’re definitely curious, so we hope we have a chance to check it out.
The other film is a short called, “Esta es me reino” (which translated means “This is my kingdom”) that will be shown in the upcoming Mexican omnibus film, “Revolución.” The project, which features ten directors (including contributions from Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna), is about “the revolution today and what it means to the young minds of Mexico” according to IMDB’s brief synopsis. The film recently played the Berlin Film Festival and is set to open in Mexico later this fall. [Stills from Bomb and Film Victoria]
A reader reminds us that Reygadas also has another picture called, “Post Tenebras Lux” in the works. It’s semi-autobiographical and centers on, “feelings, memories, dreams, things I’ve hoped for, fears, facts of my current life,” he said in Berlin earlier this year. It’s supposed to hit sometime in 2010 and the director said that, in the picture, “reason will intervene as little as possible, like an expressionist painting where you try to express what you’re feeling through the painting rather than depict what something looks like.” Sounds even more impressionistic than his past works and bordering on experimental.