Log #2
by Andrés D’Avenia
You lose track of time.
It’s been two days and it feels like a week.
You return to the hostel and start to glimpse faces with names with countries with origins with stories with projects.
So you get excited, you get carried away.
You want to know everything, ask everything, not leave without meeting everyone.
It is true, you become a bit muddled and you fall asleep thinking and trying to remember it all.
And you talk about politics. We never stop talking about politics. And when I stop to think I am standing in the middle of a demonstration at the door of the Gaumont. You start to feel that Latin America is on fire and that this helps you to understand it, by talking to those that live it from places so very different from one another. So you feel closer. That strangeness with the other diminishes. And that makes you happy.
It is like a first kiss.
Intense, eternal and with a thousand palpitations per second.
That is how I was left the first night, the first time.
Because this is also my first time at BAFICI. At a festival this big.
So then you have to learn: learn to plan, learn to make a schedule with what you want to see and what you have to do, learn that tickets run out fast, that you cannot be everywhere, that you have to choose and prioritize.
“You are learning”, you repeat time and again. Like with your first love. Big. Big like you felt the first time you came to Buenos Aires. You were 19 years old and were finally travelling without your family. A couple of friends and a city that never stops. That spoke different kinds of Spanish, that shouted, that opened its bars on Sunday nights, that had a German beerhouse in a corner where you never managed to return (yes, it was really German), that allowed you to see Iñaki Urlezaga in the highest platform of the Colón Theatre for two pesos (literally).
So many ways of speaking Spanish like those you are listening to now, when your fellow participants go by the 1x1 or for every beer that you share.
Ten years after I remembered all this. (What will I remember ten years from now? Where will we be and how will we cross paths?)
Because that was kind of how I was feeling at BAFICI. Delighted and lost at the same time.
Delighted like with Joâo Moreira Salles. That same feeling. Though it was the second time I went to one of his classes I wanted to retain everything he said. All of it. Up to the last comma. His ideas, feelings, concerns, worries. Even his contradictions (how insolent can one be).
And so went… two days? Because you lose track, like when you are on holidays at the beach.
Actually it has been three days. Today is that day that acts as a bridge, when you loosen up so as to gather momentum and recharge energies. Because we have barely gone through half of it. As if time were measurable, as if time were not something relative and subjective. Like film, like our realities and our continent: relative and subjective. Perhaps the only thing that is not is the fact that we are here and now. No intenso agora. In the intense now.
Tutor, Quintín
Translator, Clara Picasso
Talent Press Coordinator/Programmer, Mariángela Martínez Restrepo
