The Highs & Lows Of This Year's Event

Wild Tales is aptly named. Damián Szifrón’s suite of six savage revenge stories is a wildly-enjoyable collection of wildly-told tales. They’re essentially moral fables that escalate rapidly, pull a reverse and deliver a black-comic pay-off. Wild Tales is far-and-away the standout film at this year’s Spanish Film Festival, where it screens as the Closing Night film.

Opening Night, however, is a different story. Spanish Affair is an excruciating commercial rom-com filled with all manner of contrived broad-farce set-ups. The Unexpected Life fares far better as broadly-pleasing rom-com; it delivers a super-charming Javier Cámara and Raúl Arévalo as a pair of Spanish cousins shacked up in a Manhattan apartment together, its tale shot through with both cutesy romanticism and genuine melancholy. Arévalo also takes a lead turn in Marshland, which – with its moustachioed, self-destructive cops investigating a murder in a backwater – has scored comparisons to True Detective. There’s none of Carey Fukunaga’s daring formalism, but Alberto Rodríguez’s film has a real sense of grit, its 1980 setting – in the days following Franco’s death – not just an excuse for “period” wardrobe.

Many of the fest’s best films come from elsewhere. Open Cage is a droll character study set against Mexican economic collapse; Saudade a sad-eyed, coming-of-age ensemble movie in which a host of teens (and their actually-inspiring teacher) lose their innocence during Ecuador’s 1999 financial meltdown; Natural Sciences a pleasingly-minimal, vérité-tinged search-for-a-birth-father movie set in rural Argentina. The pick of these, however, is surely Dust On The Tongue, in which a pair of urban-hipster grandkids venture into rural Colombia to scatter their grandmother’s ashes and tend to their terminal grandfather. Rubén Mendoza’s beautifully-shot, quietly wry film is a weighty parable, its portrait of a grand patriarch on his deathbed – one whose land will be bequeathed to his many grandchildren, if the local guerrillas don’t forcibly take it – heavy with symbolism.

The rest of the fest includes the latest work for Australian-in-Mexico ex-pat Michael Rowe, who follows his artful-fucking film, Leap Year, with the grim domestic drama, The Well, while Finding Gaston is a light-and-fluffy documentary chronicling the career of Peruvian chef Gastón Acurio, must-see stuff for food-snobs but of little interest otherwise.

A trio of films about grief couldn’t be more different. Flowers is a measured, melancholy Basque drama about loneliness, alienation, aging and regret. They Are All Dead is a coming-of-age comedy in which a surly Mexican-Spanish teen’s former-rock star mother sees the ghost of her dead bandmate/brother. And Shrew’s Nest, a stylishly-shot horror flick produced by Álex de la Iglesia, its locked-house portrait of a haunted agoraphobic a thrill-ride blackened by both fascist symbolism and dark comedy.