Lars Rudolph eating a Brezel in Berlin

"I barely have access to movies that are not boring" said Mercedes Moncada Rodríguez after the premiere of her film La sirena y el buzo in the Berlinale Film festival about 2 weeks ago. I agreed and I told her. The film was breathtaking. The diver and the Mermaid is a tale about a young fisherman that drowns in the sea and turnes into a turtle. There is no explicit narration but the one on the intertitles and Mercedes chose to tell the story through documentary scenes taken from the daily routine of an indigenous group living on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast. Some of these scenes are really new in terms of what has been shown in the cinema before. Hypnotic and poetic. Like I felt when Beijing was inside my camera. And in a very special way -lighter and less fatalistic but just as patient- like Valuska and the drunken solar system and the whale in that cold and poor black and withe town somewhere in Hungary. Werckmeister Haromoniak, from Bela Tarr. I didn't think about their relation at all. It is very possible that the biggest thing these two films have in common is myself and the fact that I like them. I never drink coffee but today I drunk one capuccino and that made me look much more stupid when I saw an older Valuska sitting at the cafeteria eating a Brezel with his blonde daughter and speeking german. The real Valuska!




And I asked, and he told me, of course, that he is Lars Rudoph, and he is german not hungarian. And he has been working in theatre, how the hell I know that movie -am I even hungarian myself ?-, and that he now has a band called Mariahilff. And he told me with his Valuska's voice that they are going to release a new album in the next weeks.




But you don't speak hungarian? No, that was syncronized. And very well syncronized; I wish he was Valuska...