‘Aguarrás’ is a film that is not particularly pleasant to watch, but whose impression on our heads promises (or pretends) to be more lasting. This film of clear, obvious, evident documentary and testimonial contours has a discourse that is as powerful as it is at the same time dispersed. Everything and nothing at the same time. Like flipping a coin. As she did in her debut, director Carla Simón speaks to us once again about a world she knows first-hand: The film is born again from the appreciation of a legacy, and from the will to capture it before it disappears or falls into disrepair. forgot. In this way, ‘Aguarrás’ becomes, both in essence and in practice, the photograph of a memory exhibited in a totally natural way. The echoes of a moment portrayed in a close, simple and honest way. The intention, clear and clear, is that based on this folksy portrait and under the alibi of intergenerational relations, ‘Aguarrás’ serves as a kind of tribute (nostalgic, but not sentimental) to the world of agriculture and the families that live her. Like, for example, ‘Utama’, a muffled cry for the comfort of a progress that threatens the memory of a past that for many is still a present (with little future). A choral work where there is not a single protagonist: The camera is integrated as one more of the Solé family during two hours of footage. Two long (and somewhat heavy) hours that outline an idea through many threads that, in reality, they never get to pull. And it is that the idea is not channeled around an argument that takes it by the horns, since Carla Simón abandons herself to the creation of a snapshot over a story. To give a live voice to what is undisguisedly guessed to be her own childhood memories. As it is. In this way, and from the reverence of an almost childlike gaze, perhaps the scope of a realistic and authentic film is too subject to our own experiences, but not emotional or empathic for that reason. Thus, we are left with a beautiful harvest of prints that, although they work and are worth in themselves, together and united, like a theoretical family, do not transcend an idea as romantic as something vague that does not take root equally in the heart.
‘Alcarrás’ – Those wonderful years
