Oliver Laxe
Explores the landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. A major tourist destination in Thailand, the filmmakers want to capture the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.
When Amador Coro gets out of prison for having provoked a fire, nobody is waiting for him. He returns to his home town, a small village hidden in the mountains of rural Galicia, to live with his elder mother, Benedicta, and three cows. Life goes on calmly, following the rhythm of the nature. Until the night when a fire devastates the region.
A powerful international army assigns a regiment the task of guarding a mysterious man, held in a maximum security prison in the middle of the desert. Soldier Salome, daughter of Commander Antipas, becomes obsessed with him... Eros and Thanatos together reminding us that truth is based on beauty and love.
A caravan escorts an elderly and dying Sheikh through the Moroccan Atlas. His last wish is to be buried with his close ones. But death does not wait. The caravaneers, fearful of the mountain, refuse to continue transporting the corpse. Saïd and Ahmed, two rogues travelling with the caravan, say they know the way and promise to take the corpse to its destiny. In another world, Shakib is chosen to travel to the mountains with a mission: to help the improvised caravaneers.
Shooting against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the desert, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his own film set and descends into a hallucinatory, perilous adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence. A Paul Bowles story combined with observational footage forms a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself.
The story of Kaspar Hauser, who grew up in dark isolation from humanity, it is provided by a Gallician artist with a radical experimental adaptation that aims to be nothing less than a religious message. Black & white 16mm, without the language of reason, eye to eye with the primaeval puzzle. The story of Kaspar Hauser, the German 'wild child' who grew up for 16 years in silence and virtually in the dark in a stable with only a wooden horse as company, remains fascinating, also for filmmakers.
A European director is making a film with children from a social center in Tangiers. Because of his methods, his relationship with the children during shooting degenerates and transforms the evolution of the project.
A group of friends share a cinematographical experience in a particular region of Spain, Galicia. The goal is simple: to film what they like, without preconceived ideas about what should be filmed. They want their images to reflect the feelings that unite them with the people they find along the way.
A homage to Andrei Tarkovski made for the Spanish edition of the Chris Marker movie 'Une journée dans la vie d’Andrei Arsenevich'.
Footage yarn sliding over trees, fields, buildings, bulldozers, power lines... while a monotonous hum exacerbates the images.
A boy is on a journey. Things have strayed from their course without anyone knowing why. The unsettling landscape he makes his way through is both real and imaginary. The ruins he plays among and the enigmatic figures he encounters there are threatening and welcoming in turn. They teach him how to become who he is; the half-remembered fragments of the past that somehow return to him. ‘The Wind Blew On’ shows us scenes of a life lived after the end of the world has taken place, and the search for an escape from this fate.
Oliver Laxe brings us closer to his immediate world: To Vilela, where he tries to raise his vital project while reflecting on spirituality, the simple and the symbolic, on the soil on which our future is rooted. The return to the primary sector is a metaphor for how to take care of the landscape and let us take care of it.
