ARRAIANOS

"Between staged scenes of town folk caught in an existential torpor worthy of Pessoa, and strikingly lucid observational takes of the natural world and its attendant labour, with the constant persistence of a potentially vanishing landscape, Arraianos establishes a world at once mystic and profane." – Cinema Scope

Redefining ethnographic film, Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro's Arraianos exists somewhere between reality and fable as it offers an unconventional portrait of a tiny Galician village trapped in a time warp, and facing a possible apocalypse. Surrounded by a seemingly endless forest, the village is lost in both time and place, and the villagers' daily lives are a mix of the superstitious and the existentialist.

Into this milieu, Enciso weaves quasi-documentary scenes ambling through the day-to-day experiences of the townsfolk over the course of a year with para-fictional setpieces featuring the people seen in the documentary sequences. These scenes draw on both Bresson and Straub-Huillet as the villagers ‘perform' portions of playwright Jenaro Marinhas del Valle's parable of Franco's dictatorship The Forest, the philosophical themes of which are mirrored by Arraianos. Juxtaposed against the exquisitely shot documentary segments, they build to a lyrical, methodical whole, an engrossing depiction of a vanishing culture and an observational cinematic experience that defies description.

D Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro P Carlos Esbert S José Manuel Sande, Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro, Mauro Herce, Manuel Muñoz WS CinaBinario L Gallego w/English subtitles TD DCP/2012

Please note: tickets sales for this online screening close on Friday 2 August, 3.30pm.