Magnificent7 Festival Belgrade 5
The fifth film to be shown at the unique festival in Belgrade, starting this coming saturday, under the subtitle “European feature documentaries”, organised by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic and their team, and with me taking part in the selection is
SEPTEMBERS
Every September, behind bars of the “Soto de Real” prison in Madrid, the Festival of Song which is an extremly popular karaoke contest, takes place. The festival participants are prisoners who come from different jails in Spain. They are the protagonists of this film. The festival is the starting point from which we enter the prisoner’s life of four men and four women and the intimate world of their relationships. Love or lack of love, the universal alomodovarian eruption of emotion, lets us come closer to the penitentiary drama from an aspect we can all understand. There, the year’s length is being measured from September to September, from the last to the next festival – this film describes true, deep, exciting love stories – how they develop and how they fall apart.
MY WORDS “If 9 out of 10 films deal with love, its one too little, said Francois Truffaut and right it is. This film about love behind the bars is built like a romantic drama, it has everything, tears for crying, tears for laughing, happy moments, sorrow. Some of the inmates leave the prison waiting for the one and only they met inside. And in between there are song contests with songs that are about… yes, Love. Carlos Bosch, nominated for an Oscar for his “Balseros”, knows how to build a story. It’s a film for all of us, with wonderful characters.”
