The Croatian premiere of yet another Latin American film that won an award in Venice, in the Horizons section, Neon Bull, is scheduled for 7pm, Europa Cinema. Gabriel Mascaro’s film reveals the face of Brazil we have not yet had a chance to see. At 9pm Europa is screening In the Crosswind, a daring debut film by Martti Helde that uses live images to re-enact long lost memories of Baltic families separated by Stalin’s deportations in the 1940s. Before the screenings, both films will be personally presented by their director.
Neon Bull, a visually lavish second feature narrative by Gabriel Mascaro is a story about a bull groomer called Iremar, who works in vaquejada, traditional Brazilian rodeo. Iremar is secretly in love with Gallega, a troupe dancer who doesn’t care about him much. Although he seems like a real macho and a rough cowboy, Iremar has a very unusual pastime – he sews extravagant costumes and dreams of a different life.
In the Crosswind is a dreamlike saga of survival and perseverance of memory inspired by actual diary records about deportations of thousands of people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Siberia as part of ethnic cleansing conducted by the Soviet government by Stalin’s orders. The written memories in the film are brought to life in the form of black and white tableaux vivants in which the actors keep still in frozen positions while the camera moves around them, creating an emotional space between motion and stillness. The past finally becomes tangible and the present seems like a dream.