The Water [Fiction]
Elena López Riera
France, Spain, Switzerland | 2022 | 104 min
Language : Spanish
Subtitles : French, English
In a small village in Southern Spain, in the heat of the summer, a storm is brewing. According to an old belief, women will disappear the next time the river overflows, because they have “water in them”. In this electric atmosphere, a group of youths smoke, dance, desire each other… This is a striking debut feature film by Elena López Riera.
In a small village in south-eastern Spain, an endless summer stretches out ahead of this group of young friends. In the midst of the electric heat, they smoke, dance and lust after each other. But a storm is threatening to make the river overflow, reviving an old folk belief: during the next flood, women will disappear... Based on stories drawn from the oral tradition, gathered from the village where she grew up, Elena López Riera weaves a tale filled with tension. The filmmaker gleans the details of this everyday world she knows so well, revealing its magnetic power and beauty. Taking a quasi-documentary approach, her film plays with genres in a contemporary style: head-on eyewitness accounts are mixed with amateur footage of floods and scenes performed by actresses, dazzling in their economy of movement. At once a magical story of initiation, an electric teenage romance and a fantastical film anchored in daily life, El agua constantly flirts with reality, in a search for ordinariness and truth.
Madeline Robert
