'Secaderos': magical realism 'granaíno' free and recondite

2023-06-02T10:47:59.105Z

Highlights: Rocío Mesa brings Granada's rural pride to the big screen with her new film, Secaderos. The film is a mix of oneirism, poetry, surrealism and even magical realism. It is set in the fertile plain of Granada, where a group of families work in the collection and drying of tobacco. It was awarded the audience award in the Visions section of the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, in March. It stars Clara Roquet, Estíbaliz Urresola and Chema García Ibarra.

Rocío Mesa fuses in her second feature the work in the field and the youth bottles with the ditches, reggaeton and children's choirs of the mass

Many of the young Spanish filmmakers, especially women, are looking at the people and the countryside, at traditions and at the struggle between the bitter present and the uncertain future, from codes far from social realism. Adding oneirism, poetry, surrealism and even magical realism. Films a span of mud and work, but that are not afraid of the lyric and to place their stories right in that thin wire that separates the documentary from the fiction. Titles commanded mostly by non-professional interpreters, and very free in the formal, which are deployed in the feature film format but that had already been rehearsed before in short films, a field in which their authors were professionally trained while forging their own style that seems to converge in an entire generation.

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Rocío Mesa, the filmmaker who brings Granada's rural pride to the big screen

Thus, to the films of, among others, Carla Simón (Summer 1993, Alcarràs), Elena López Riera (the short films Pueblo, Las vísceras and Los que desean, and the long El agua), Clara Roquet (the short film Les bones nenes), Meritxell Colell (Con el viento), Estíbaliz Urresola (the short film Polvo somos and 20,000 especies de abejas) and Chema García Ibarra (the short film La disco resplandece), Rocío Mesa now joins Secaderos, a mysterious second work as director, set in the fertile plain of Granada, where a group of families work in the collection and drying of tobacco through a complex system of processing, hanging and packaging, and where a small baby has arrived from Madrid that, in the company of its mother, He spends one of those life-changing summers at his grandparents' house.

Mesa, who shares many parallels with López Riera —Secaderos and El agua seem like cousins sisters—, although veering from oneirism to magical realism, and a step below in terms of quality, fuses the work in the field and the juvenile bottles next to the ditches; reggaeton and children's choirs of the mass; fantasy and superstitions; the effervescent youthful fornication and the tight affection of grandparents; learn to twist the neck of rabbits, and then eat it on a plate with onions; The bumper cars, the fairs, always the fairs, the flash poles, the first cigarette of childhood, the first tripi of adolescence, and the indecision between staying to train a new generation of farm workers or leaving there by legs.

With clear and simple metaphors, but of great effectiveness (the birds in the open cages that, however, do nothing to escape; the shelter of the friendly monster of tobacco), the Granada director based in Los Angeles (California) has composed a free and recondite work in which there are passages that seem like a documentary that sequences that border on video creation. Formats in principle antagonistic that, in their way of carving this exercise of passion and tenderness, converge with the strangeness that always offers the courage that escapes the conventional, including a handful of zooms at the wrong time and a musical segment near its outcome that can fascinate or provoke eyebrow arches.

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Secaderos, a magical tale of brotherly love and social pain, winner of the audience award in the Visions section of the SXSW festival in Austin (Texas), speaks, like some of her fellow filmmakers of generation, of the disappearance of a world, of a way of life, of an identity. And she does it with the blessed impudence of an exercise taken from the guts, starring three generations of women united by blood and separated by time.