Fire Will Come

Amador, convicted of arson, finishes his sentence and returns to his village in the Galician mountains and to his elderly mother. Nobody asks him anything and nobody forgets either. Oliver Laxe builds slowly: cattle, fog, felled eucalyptus, silent evenings. Then a fire starts and the film abruptly becomes something else, with the flame sequences carrying a documentary hardness. The question of who is responsible is deliberately left open, because the real subject is how a village lives with suspicion and what the forest has become economically. The cast is largely non-professional locals. It won the jury prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. Who it is for: viewers who like slow cinema and films about people and the land. Who it is not for: anyone wanting incident and resolution, since neither is offered.