Anunciaron tormenta

When history is written by the victors and the colonial burden is still a country’s legacy – what is needed to recapture the narratives of the past? ANUNCIARON TORMENTA follows the traces of Ësáasi Eweera, a leader of the Bubi people on an island in what is today’s Equatorial Guinea, who challenged the Spanish and therefore was captured and eliminated in 1904.
In his first feature-length film made outside of the experimental documentary collective “Los hijos” to which he belongs, director Javier Fernández Vázquez allows the film material to tell of an suppressive history by any means necessary. He introduces photographs of buildings and dungeons that slowly lose form in white light; he intersects the flow of memories with readings of the Spanish rulers’ records; and he follows people to historical but now abandoned sites where thick undergrowth and a feeling of uncertainty are all that remain. In some moments the film is reminiscent of Straub or Kluge, when Vázquez uses the means of metonymy, recitation, replication or transposition for his narrative approach. The viewer ends up at the crossroads of critical postcolonial cinema, the repossession of the past, and a thriller following the traces of a murder. (Gunnar Landsgesell)

Javier Fernández Vázquez: SEÑALES DE INDIFERENCIA (2007, K), YA VIENE, AGUANTA, RIÉGUEME, MÁTAME (2009, K), LOS MATERIALES (2010, Ko-Regie), CIRCO (2010, Ko-Regie), JANUARY 2012 OR THE APOTHEOSIS OF ISABEL, THE CATHOLIC QUEEN (2012, K, Ko-Regie), ÁRBOLES (2013, Ko-Regie)