Mit geschlossen Augen
Austria,
1999, 84 min
Shown in 2001
CREDITS
- dir
-
Mansur Madavi
- scr
-
Mansur Madavi
- cam
-
Mansur Madavi
- editor
-
Mansur Madavi
- mus
-
Orlando F. Orellana
- cast
-
Lorenzo Montalbán, Félix Alcallaga, Rubén Fernández, Hans Michael Díaz Espinosa, Christian Campilay
- source
-
Austrian Film Commission, Stiftgasse 6, A-1070 Vienna, Austria. FAX: 43-1-526-68-01. EMAIL: afilmco@magnet.at
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Mansur Madavi in person.
OTHER
The opening moments of With Closed Eyes ring with echoes of the stark, dusty landscapes of cinema poets like Sergio Leone, Alejandro Jodorowski and Jorge Sanjinés. “I believe in the power of the image and the visual association,” filmmaker Mansur Madavi says, and his minimalist vision is nostalgic and dreamlike. A grown man, Lorenzo, meditates on his distant childhood, that of a boy who can’t do anything right. Every day Lorenzo is late for school. Day after day, Lorenzo never finishes his homework, and what little of it he does always has the wrong answers. Every day the flag is raised and the mischievous dark-eyed schoolboys innocently sing the national anthem. On the way home, the boys look through a peephole at a beautiful young woman taking a shower, more like Norman Bates than Huck Finn. Into this Buñuelian universe one day a dust storm comes, like a mysterious fog in a science fiction movie. A madman on a motorcycle drives around town and shouts, “God, where are you? Are you crazy?” And in the end, two men in dark suits and sunglasses arrive in an automobile, like a couple of exterminating angels, and take away Lorenzo’s unforgiving teacher, who has transgressed, we’re not sure how or why.
—Miguel Pendás
FACTOID #50
The San Francisco International Film Festival, which kicked off December 4, 1957, is the longest continuously running film festival in the Americas.
