The Year of the Discovery

Make it a double feature—see it with Luis López Carrasco’s first feature, El Futuro.

Shot on Hi-8 videotape entirely within a typically smoky Spanish snack bar in the city of Cartagena in Murcia—with occasional interruptions from the archive in the form of propagandistic news bulletins and exuberant TV commercials—Luis López Carrasco’s second feature excavates the forgotten histories of 1992. In this pivotal year, Spain celebrated both the Olympic Games in Barcelona and the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas—and ushered in a new age of neoliberalism and economic restructuring. Through one-on-one interviews, complex split-screen compositions, and subtle manipulations of time, The Year of the Discovery offers a vivid counternarrative to the official history, one in which industrial labor’s toll on the body and the brutal fracturing of communities testifies against a national mythology of progress. An NYFF58 Currents selection.