10 essential films from Atlàntida Film Fest

BarcelonaThe Atlàntida Film Fest is the mother of all online festivals. Organized as always by Filmin, it has not lost the spirit with which it was born fifteen years ago: to discover unreleased auteur cinema programmed at major international festivals – and from our own country – and to recover the work of established filmmakers. Since 2016, it has combined the online edition with a face-to-face version in Palma, the Atlàntida Mallorca Film Fest, which this year will receive such illustrious visitors as David Lowery, Alexander Desplat, Gael García Bernal, Javier Bardem, and Victoria Luengo. Both editions kick off this Friday, but while the in-person festival lasts a week, the online version allows you to see the 91 films in the program – 65 of which are new to the State – until August 24.

‘Mektoub, my love: Canto uno’

It is hard to understand that after winning the Palme d'Or in 2013 with Blue is the Warmest Color (best film of 2013 for the critics of ARA), best film of 2013 for the critics of ARA), Abdellatif Kechiche has not released a film in our country again. Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno, a sensual portrait of the sentimental labyrinths of youth that premiered in 2017 at the Venice Film Festival, will finally be shown at l'Atlàntida before its release on July 31 on Filmin. In parallel, the second part, Mektoub, My Love: Canto Dos, released last year in Locarno, will be screened at the in-person edition of l'Atlàntida.

'Eephus'

The best debut of American independent cinema of this decade is a portrait of sport as a community experience and a praise of patchanga as a way of life. At the antipodes of FIFA values, Carson Lund –director of photography for another great indie filmmaker, Tyler Taormina– films an eternal baseball game with an empathy and humanism that recalls the great works of Richard Linklater or the late Frederick Wiseman, who makes a sound cameo in the film.

‘Annie Ernaux at school’

The relationship between Atlàntida and Annie Ernaux goes back a long way. In 2022, before winning the Nobel Prize, the French writer presented at the festival Les années Super 8, the documentary that Ernaux's son directed based on his parents' home films. This year, the online edition will feature the observational documentary by the indefatigable Claire Simon on how French secondary school students read and study Annie Ernaux's work. In addition, the in-person edition will premiere the adaptation of one of the author's great works, Memòria de noia, published by Angle, directed by Judith Godrèche, one of the central figures of French Me Too.

‘Hen (The Hen)’

Fans of the animal fable starring the donkey Eo (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022) have a new heroine: the hen from Hen, whose trail György Pálfi's film follows from the moment she hatches, escapes from an industrial farm and ends up finding refuge in the henhouse of a dilapidated restaurant. A thrilling adventure narrated with down-to-earth humor that contemplates the world from the point of view of a brave hen determined to protect her eggs from human greed.

‘Kingdom’

The great discovery of the last edition of the D'A Festival, where it won the Talents award, is this fascinating portrait of the dynamics of a group of far-right radical youths in a country on the verge of collapse. Debutant Michał Ciechomski approaches each scene as a formal challenge to describe the fabric of masculinity, sense of belonging, violence, and repressed sexuality that shapes ideological fanaticism.

‘Six days in spring’

The prestige of Belgian Joachim Lafosse has been quite damaged since a dozen women – including Virginie Efira – accused him of creating a “toxic and destabilizing environment” on his film sets, but it is precisely now that he has directed his best work. In Six jours ce printemps-là a divorced mother improvises a vacation with her two children at their paternal grandparents' house on the French Riviera, where they are staying for a few days in hiding with the mother's new partner. A small, sensitive film of charming naturalism that won awards for best direction and screenplay at the last San Sebastián Festival.

‘Yes!’

One of the season's blockbuster films. In the new film by the Israeli Nadav Lapid, an Israeli dancer and musician perform extreme choreographies to liven up the parties of the country's economic and political elites and, when appropriate, also engage in prostitution. From there to accepting the commission to compose an anthem of nationalist fervor is only one step. Beyond satire, Lapid portrays how art and beauty are annihilated by power and brutality in a genocidal regime.

‘Truly naked’

Many teenagers lend a hand to their father in the family business, but not when the father is a porn actor. Theo helps record, edit, and distribute online the sequences his father films at home with various actresses, an experience that inevitably ends up affecting the boy's relationship with sex. Director Muriel D'Ansembourg sidesteps the sordidness inherent in the premise with direction that emphasizes the tenderness and intimacy of the characters' relationships.

‘Ulysses' Gaze’

Another cinematic odyssey is that of Theo Angelopoulos, in which a Greek filmmaker exiled in the United States (Harvey Keitel) returns to his country to embark on a journey in search of the first film shot in the Balkans. Atlàntida revives Ulysses' Gaze within an almost complete retrospective of the Greek director with restored versions and his only short film, a cinematic event that Filmin has made a reality after years of negotiations with the Angelopoulos family.

‘Kokuho: the Master of Kabuki’

Despite distancing itself from the authorial line of Atlàntida, this great production of tragic aromas set in post-war Japan, in which the son of a Yakuza leader begins a career as a kabuki actor, should be highlighted in the festival's programming. A tribute to traditional Japanese theater, the film was a social phenomenon in its country and is the highest-grossing non-animated Japanese film in history.