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Unworldly Spain Amidst Its Worldly Crisis

The rural landscape of southern Spain, the shadow of the international crisis, a secret love story and a group of knights travelling in a car: Cristina Diz’s SLEEPLESS KNIGHTS from the Berlinale Forum.


Cristina Diz’s SLEEPLESS KNIGHTS

Try to fold all the stories in Stephen Frears’ TAMARA DREWE and place them into Extremadura, a rural dale in southern Spain. The sultry weather is like a tidal breeze in full summer, yet calm in every sense of the word. Stefan Butzmühlen and Cristina Diz’s first feature, SLEEPLESS KNIGHTS (Spain, Germany) in the Berlinale Forum, opens with a young man, Carlos, who sits in his living room, sipping tea while his senile father walks somnolently toward the door.

Carlos, an unemployed young man makes an exodus back home, prompted by the recent economic trouble in Spain. The film doesn't portray how he gets home from Madrid, where he previously worked; Carlos is just there, watching over his family’s sheep, stepping in for his senile father. Upon his return, he sees how his village has changed, and is startled. There he meets and soon builds a romance with Juan, a local policeman. The Spanish economic crisis forms the backdrop for their relationship. Butzmühlen and Diz use disconnected images to show how freely the two men explore each other’s bodies without any intervention from their surroundings. The people around Carlos and Juan are ignorant of what is going on between them.

A parallel narrative exists in which a flock of armoured “Knights” like those in Ingmar Bergman’s THE SEVENTH SEAL are heading somewhere. It is just that their car (yes, the knights ride in a car) runs into trouble in the middle of nowhere, and they have to stop. We don’t know who they are and what they are really up to, but their surreal behavior – reciting poems as they roast fish for dinner – brings a fascinating humour of its own. The scene with the knights recalls Michelangelo Frammartino’s LE QUATTRO VOLTE: sheep acting as if they understand what the director wants, flowers shedding fragrances, and the village looks almost mystical.

In Indonesia, where I come from, homosexuality automatically results in burning in hell for eternity. In their view, homosexuality does not come from society nor from biology, but directly from evil. SLEEPLESS KNIGHTS provokes in me questions about these beliefs: despite their conservative rural environment, the film depicts Carlos and Juan's unbounded attraction, staring endlessly at each other, without social restrictions. In the west, developments in the past century, from Foucault's philosophical exploration of homosexuality in the 60s, and international superstars like Elton John coming out of the closet – has enabled their relationship, yet this still isn't possible everywhere in the world.


301 Moved Permanently

301 Moved Permanently


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