Official Competition 2018

And What Is the Summer Saying

Payal Kapadia I 2018 I 23'

SYNOPSIS

The summer has its own songs. Whispering softly, they make their way to us from the depths of the jungle. They tell of furtive love and the bees that gather honey. The heat of the summer discourages fast movements.

BIOGRAPHY

Payal Kapadia

PAYAL KAPADIA (India, 1986) is a filmmaker and artist from Bombay. Her work includes documentary, experimental and animation. Her work includes the films The Last Mango Before the Monsoon (2014), which was part of the Vanguards section at FILMADRID 2015, Afertnoon Clouds (2016), which could be seen in the Official Competition at FILMADRID 2017, and her feature films A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) and All We Imagine As Light (2023).

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Critical text

The work of Payal Kapadia is not unknown to FILMADRID audience. After The Last Mango Before the Monsoon (2016) and Afternoon Clouds (2017), And What Is the Summer Saying is the lastest milestone in the career of this Indian filmmaker. Shot in the surroundings of Bhimashankar, in the shadows of the Sahyadri mountains, the film explores the borderlands between memory and the imaginary through a nocturnal journey, introspective, almost unreal. The refined black and white, the animation or the alternation between domestic spaces and wild vegetation are some of the elements that follow each other in a hypnotic way, guided by a discourse in off that is as enveloping as it is suggestive. Thus, the sound propitiates transcendental atmospheres throughout the entire length of the film, forming an immaterial warp of voices and noises whose origin we can only guess. The «secrets of the bees», the smoke and the past work in the manner of cinematographic symptoms, pointing in the direction of the spaces between representation and what is evoked, between nostalgia and the mimesis -substitution- within an ephemeral region of existence. RAMÓN DEL BUEY

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