Madrid 2020 seen from over a hundred years ago. A “Psycho-Sociological Study with Drawings and Photographs from Real Life” from 1901 sheds light on the various kinds of “lowlifes”: Criminals, parasites, outcasts and homosexuals populate the city. Both humorously and critically, the film examines the architecture, social structure and categories of outsiderdom. The result is a playful praise of disobedience.
Enza, in her early twenties, is a singer and seeker studying the rhythms of life in Salento. She breathes music, collects old folksongs and thus connects the people, the present and the past. Rooted in Tarantism and in the tradition of the healers she uses singing as a means to fight alienation. Her portrait is a cinematic legacy vibrating with intensity. It reveals the thin line walked by those who refuse to be satisfied with relative freedom.
As a happily married manager of a department store, everything in the protagonist’s life is peaceful and orderly. But on his customary walk through the park one Sunday, he is suddenly confused by a sign marked with just one word: “Park”. The disturbance is so great that his everyday routine is thrown into chaos. Freely adapted from a story by Arthur Schnitzler.
More than twenty years have passed since the death of Catalan architect Enric Miralles. He left iconic traces with his buildings, not just in and around Barcelona – the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh is also based on his designs. Maria Mauti chooses a poetic approach to her impressive protagonist, in eleven variations. They take us from the Igualada cemetery to a community centre in Hostalets de Balenyà, a gym in Huesca or the Torre Marenostrum office skyscraper in Barcelona. The architect’s home with its open and at the same time labyrinthine character is given a major role, becoming the starting point and epicentre of a unique mind.
Maria Mauti carefully scans the still lively architectures, stages them. In Huesca, the smell of a sweating soccer team seems to mingle with the omnipresent cool raw concrete, while a group of Spanish cowboys and cowgirls shake their leather boots in the futuristic community centre. Despite the tragic note that comes from the work of the prematurely deceased, “Miralles” is not without a certain wit. This poised essay which combines personal and theoretical statements achieves a multi-layered quality that is in itself evocative of a Miralles design: airy and dense, abrupt and fluid, always idiosyncratic.
