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WHILE AT WAR
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Alejandro Amenábar reconstructs a difficult and decisive moment in Spanish history with his usual sense of precision, but he doesn't manage to inject the emotion and energy this conflict requires
"When I wrote this screenplay, someone advised me - once they'd read it - not to make the film, because I'd make a lot of enemies along the way", revealed Alejandro Amenábar, shortly before one of the special screenings of his new feature While At War [+], organised for members of Spain's Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences ahead of the movie's world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and its present showcasing in competition at the 67th San Sebastián International Film Festival. "But thanks to the support of my producer, Fernando Bovaira, we followed through with the project and here is the finished product. Now you are the ones who must decide whether it was worth it", he concluded, before receiving his share of applause.
Already, when filming first began in Salamanca on While At War - which recreates the conflict Miguel de Unamuno lived through in this university town, with his own ideas about supporting the army's rebellion against the Spanish Republic - it raised a few eyebrows: "Amenábar's making a film about the civil war?", the most suspicious individuals puzzled. But an incursion into the pages of History by a methodical director who won the Oscar for The Sea Inside [+] isn't actually that surprising: what, after all, was Agora [+] if not a political (and anti-fanatic) film?
With While At War, Amenábar is staying true to the style which has characterised his career: extremely well measured and calm, as from the very outset with Thesis. As implied by the title of his debut film, his particular brand of cinema is based on meticulous theories and principles which he goes on to develop in his films. The musician and director gathers together a maximum of information on the topics he broaches, he immerses himself in their recesses and their formulae before emerging with a screenplay which supports a given argument. He did it with Regression [+], with Open Your Eyes and now he's back proving his point once again in a film which tries to hold a mirror up to today's socio-political situation and the dangerous rise of the far right. It's a film of denunciation and a warning, therefore, hidden beneath the folds of historical reconstruction.
by Alfonso Rivera. CINEUROPA
READ MORE: https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/378467/
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