The Moviegoer

Like the good film addict that I am, I timed my return to Spain around DocumentaMadrid, which so impressed me last year. This year’s festival is almost over, and though I’d intended to blog it more, time’s been at a premium as I’ve been overwhelmed with such bizarre problems with my Spanish residency (which will undoubtedly become a separate post). For now I am very pleased both that my favorite documentary from the Berlinale, Defamation (Hashmatsa), was showing here and that it won the audience award in the category of feature documentary. It will be presented tomorrow afternoon during the award screenings. Last year I attended several award sessions (there are four this year) and was very pleased with the quality of the films, so this year that’s where I’ll be spending what is predicted to be the 2nd cold and rainy Sundays out of three since I arrived. But I can’t complain; the last ten days or so the weather has been beautiful.

The new discovery for me in this film festival was Andres Weiel and I saw three of his documentaries back-to-back at the Goethe Institution (which, as I understand it, has a film archive as part of its library). I will have to join in order to check out more of Weiel’s work, because two of the three documentaries that I saw very much intrigued me with a new way of asking a very old question — why and how does human society so often turn violent? I know that at least one other film, Black Box, is something I need to add to my Weiel repertoire. Watching subtitled film in one’s second and third languages is always challenging. It’s really great practice, especially for an American who was exclusively monolingual as a child, to link those foreign language pathways together. More on Veiel’s work here soon; I was mightily impressed.