To War

Q&A with Francisco Marise

Living alone in rural Cuba, special forces veteran Andrés Rodríguez Rodríguez maintains his former training regimen: calisthenics, camouflage, and tactical combat exercises. Haunted by memories of the Angolan and Nicaraguan wars, he channels his trauma through his aging but still active body, and seeks comfort by phoning the families of former comrades. Pairing episodes from Andrés’s day-to-day life with military-related archival footage and excerpts from American war movies, this psychological portrait from first-time director Francisco Marise brings the past to bear on the present in visceral fashion.

Preceded by:
Gulyabani
Gürcan Keltek, Netherlands/Turkey, 2018, 34m
Turkish with English subtitles
In Gürcan Keltek’s mesmerizing short, an ostracized clairvoyant recalls traumatic episodes from her past through diary entries and letters to her estranged son. Accompanied by ominous images of the Turkish landscape and unsettling music cues, her words reflect, painfully and poetically, on a lineage of violence left largely unacknowledged.