After reviewing the films that we found most notable at the Atlàntida Mallorca Film Fest 2024, we make a selection of five discoveries, including the winner of the Filmin festival.
The Silver Venus (Héléna Klotz)
The AMFF 2024-winning film is the second feature film by Héléna Klotz, a filmmaker who became known (apart from being the daughter of director Nicolas Klotz) with the promising ‘The Atomic Age’ (2012). Starring Niels Schneider (‘Strike of Luck’, ‘Blood and Money’) and French pop star Pomme (Claire Pommet, in her acting debut), ‘The Silver Venus’ is a remarkable coming-of-age drama set in the world of finance and trading.
The film can be seen as a feminine, youthful and late-capitalist mix of ‘Wall Street’ (1987) and ‘Martin Eden’ (2019). A visually hypnotic tale of careerism, class desertion and coming of age, starring an aspiring wolf of Wall Street characterised by her androgynous appearance, talent for finance and a willpower as ironclad as it is ruthless. One of the great discoveries of the Official Section. 8
Rossosperanza (Annarita Zambrano)
Like Héléna Klotz, the Paris-based Italian director Annarita Zambrano had already attracted attention with her debut, ‘After the War’ (2017), presented at Cannes. With the nineties and very musical ‘Rossosperanza’ she has confirmed her unique talent. The film is a Pasolini-esque satire on the concept of a heteropatriarchal and bourgeois family, set in 1990 in a clinic to “cure” “problematic” young posh people.
A sociopathic DJ who uses music as a refuge, the homosexual son of a Christian Democrat politician, a sugar daddy seductress who aspires to be a diva and an introverted and violent boy with artistic inclinations. These are the four “patients” of the clinic portrayed by the director through a narrative full of time jumps and imaginative escapes (including a great animation sequence), with a lot of techno music, black humor and sequences of great allegorical power. 7.9
The Rapture (Iris Kaltenbäck)
One of the most acclaimed debuts of last year in France. Awarded at Cannes and nominated for the Cesar Awards (Best First Film and Leading Actress, a fabulous Hafsia Herzi), ‘The Rapture’ is a psychological drama about motherhood, about how the birth of a child affects a friendship, inspired by a real case. The story of a small lie that becomes bigger and bigger as the protagonist, a midwife with emotional problems, adds layers and layers to her deception until she finds herself trapped in it. A headlong flight with fatal consequences.
Filmmaker Iris Kaltenbäck creates an extraordinary character, full of nuances and psychological complexity. This is the main interest of the film: not to judge the character but to understand him, to explain how a “normal” person can do something like that, to show the psychological and emotional mechanisms that can push someone to behave in that way. And Kaltenbäck does it in an exceptional way, demonstrating that she has enormous control over the narrative rhythm and dramatic tension. A gem from a director to follow closely. 8.5
The man of a thousand faces (Sonia Kronlund)
I have always thought that the expression “guilty pleasure” should not be applied to listening with Bacchic gusto to things like the Eurocup remix of ‘Potra salvaje’, to give a recent example, but to enjoying like a pig watching films, as in this case, morally reprehensible. The documentary ‘El hombre de las mil caras’, no matter how much of an idiot the protagonist is and how much feminist discourse its director has, is nothing other than the orchestration of a revenge, the chronicle of a plot to unmask and ridicule a fraud, the “man of a thousand faces” of the title. But not through legal means, but through public ridicule and commercial exploitation (a book and a podcast have also been published).
And director Sonia Kronlund is almost as deceitful as the scoundrel she pursues (a guy who pretends to be other people to trick the women he seduces). She uses the same weapons, deceit and manipulation, to catch him. What happens is that 1) she doesn’t fool the viewer (a sign at the beginning warns us that “this film is not a journalistic investigation”) and 2) the documentary is very, very entertaining, and the revenge is hilarious. You’re evil, Sonia. 7
From the rearview mirror (Maciek Hamela)
A car and a camera. Nothing else is needed to document the human side of the war in Ukraine. This award-winning documentary was born from the desire to help of Polish filmmaker Maciek Hamela. A Russian and Ukrainian speaker, Hamela bought a minivan and, together with a camera operator, set out to transport refugees fleeing the bombings. During the journeys, he collected testimonies from passengers and filmed the devastation he encountered along the way. A very simple, minimalist device, but with enormous dramatic power.
Like a documentary called ‘Night on Earth’ (1991), ‘From the Rearview Mirror’ puts the viewer in the seat of the rescue car as another passenger. We travel with the refugees through destroyed neighborhoods and roads cut off by bombs, passing military checkpoints and listening to their stories about what they have left behind and what they expect from the future. Hamela does not seek sensationalism or shocking and viral images, but rather to observe war in its most intimate and everyday dimension. Next to the victims, not above them. 8
