ABSTRACT
Cow-eyes, eyes that entangle, blue-flecked lamb’s eyes and the dilating pupils of dead eyes. It’s all there in Julio Medem’s eyes: a much darker creative sensibility than the texture of his films might suggest. Vacas (1992), La ardilla roja (The Red Squirrel, 1993), Tierra (1996) and Los amantes del circulo polar (Lovers of the Arctic Circle, 1998) have amassed awards and effusive praise in international festivals and markets for their striking images and ideas, establishing their creator as the leading light of contemporary Spanish film-makers. Yet Medem is less Basque or Spanish than universal in his themes. He uses the camera to focus on dilemmas of duality, chance encounters, fateful symmetry and a body-and-soul divide, while incest, amnesia, schizophrenia and death are just a few aspects of the human condition that he treats with a sensuality that is expressed in the responsiveness of his colours, camera-work and editing. For desire is the driving force of Medem’s films and their metaphorical complexity, both visually and structurally, is invariably traversed by characters in search of love and a little enlightenment. Medem, too, is after a little clarity in his vision, criss-crossing the border between post-modernism and metaphysics in his search for images that express emotional truths.
