Espejos 2022

Los que desean

Elena López Riera | 2018 | 24'

SYNOPSIS

In southern Spain, a peculiar hand-painted pigeon race will reward not the fastest, but the one who manages to seduce a pigeon and fly as long as possible by its side.

BIOGRAPHY

Elena López Riera

Elena López Riera (1982, Spain) has an internationally recognized career as a short filmmaker. His first short film, Pueblo (2015) premiered at the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival and Las vísceras (2016) at the Locarno Festival. His latest work, Los que desean (2018) won numerous international awards including the Pardino d'Oro for best short film at the Locarno Festival, a special mention from the jury at the San Sebastian Festival - Zabaltegui, the Grand Prix at Zinebi, Grand Prix at Vila do Conde and an EFA nomination, as well as participating as a video installation at the MOMA PS1 in New York as part of Openhouse spring exhibition.

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Critical text

In the Levante area there is a sport that consists of training pigeons to chase a female. The pigeons are painted in bright colours to identify them and the winner is the one who is able to stay with the female for the longest time, either in flight or on the ground. In her third short film, Elena López Riera makes a collective portrait and a profound reflection on the gaze of men (cis- hetero), based on the observation of this game and its particularities.

The pigeons, deprived of their sexuality from maturity, obsessively gather around a single female during the competition and the men watch attentively, projecting onto these animals their culture and idiosyncrasies, which include, among other things, not only the assumption of the female as the object of desire, but also the rejection of dissident sexual behaviour on the part of the pigeons.

Los que desean is effectively a film about desire in a masculine key and becomes a poetic essay on the patriarchal system, making it clear that it is a social construct, suggesting that as such, it can be overturned. NURIA CUBAS

Technical Sheet