Strange River

Drawing on his own memories of riverside campsites, overstuffed bike bags, stifling tents, and the buzz of cicadas, Catalan writer-director Jaume Claret Muxart drops us amongst a family of three boys on a summer holiday along the Danube. Amid the brothers’ bickering and detours into one parent’s love of Bauhaus architecture and the other’s affinity for Romantic poetry, Muxart zeroes in on the more intuitive and inchoate passions of 16-year-old Dídac (dazzling newcomer Jan Monter, nominated for best new actor at both the Goya and Gaudí Awards). The oldest of the boys, Dídac is perhaps taking his last family vacation as a child, with all the moodiness and confusion that implies. Swimming in the Danube, Dídac is the only one to see a skinny-dipper—a lithe young man about his own age—and he keeps seeing him throughout the trip in ambiguous sequences, possibly fantasies, that plumb the romantic depths of the indolent adolescent imagination. Shooting on 16mm and scoring scenes with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Ravel, Muxart conjures up a sun-kissed daydream in his acclaimed feature debut.

Travel support generously provided by Instituto Cervantes