You All Are Captains (Todos vós sodes capitáns)
Nov 18 - Nov 23, 2011
(Oliver Laxe, Spain/Morocco, 2010, 35mm, 79min)
Seattle Premiere!
Director Oliver Laxe in attendance!
Compared with the films of Abbas Kiarostami and Francois Truffaut, Spanish-French director Oliver Laxe's You Are All Captains follows a self-described "neo-colonialist" filmmaker, playfully portrayed by Laxe, who goes to Tangier ostensibly to hold a series of workshops for disadvantaged street children. It quickly becomes clear, however, that Laxe's intention is to turn these children into pawns in his own feature. The film questions cinema's role in cultural exchange by deftly blurring the line between fiction and documentary. You Are All Captains unveils though its magnificent black-and-white images of daily life, the problems of filmmaking in a global economic reality. A mysterious, whimsical and unique creation that won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes.
"Laxe filmed "Captains" in a black-and-white that is almost luminous, and the sound design is remarkable. The gabble of kids' voices, the sharp chirps of birds, the sibilances of the wind coursing through a wheat field in a section where the boys are taken on a trip to the country, are all deployed to create a kind of tone poem that slowly but surely casts a spell over the viewer.' —Seattle Times
"Remarkable...one of the rare movies in which action is imbued with thought, and in which the very process of thought seems to come to life. The movie’s scale is small, its subjects are intimate, its artistic reach is immense." —Richard Brody, New Yorker
"[A] brilliantly constructed deconstruction of "truth" versus "fiction." —Village Voice
"Poignant and dryly, philosophically ironic." —New Yorker
Join Oliver Laxe in conversation on Saturday at 2pm at the Project Room