MAP / MAPA / UK PREMIERE

Dir: Elías León Siminiani
Spain | 2012 | 85 mins
Spanish with English subtitles

A young Spanish director is fired from his job in television. Taking up his dream of making films, he travels to India hoping to make his first feature film, and in the process retraces the journey made by his ex-girlfriend – only to discover that his real investigation is not in India, but in Madrid. However, when he gets home, things do not turn out exactly as he had expected…

Halfway between documentary and fiction, Mapa is a road movie in first person, as defined by its director – a ‘movie-song’. Equally moving and wryly funny, it’s an evocation on how different lives can be in different halves of the globe. It won Best Documentary at the Seville Film Festival and was nominated in the same category at Spain’s prestigious Goya Awards.

Map is a film-diary. It contains events that are real and narrated in the first person. Nothing is fictional. I filmed my own life situations for two years and a half, according I was living them. As if while filming them I was trying to understand them better, as if I was trying to put them in order. But in life things happen much faster than in cinema. Everything is more amorphous and chaotic. Thus, the editing challenge was to find a way to transform this collection of personal images into a film. This challenge is an integral part of the proposal. Or in other words, Map builds itself in front of the spectator, sharing doubts and fears but also hopes and revelations. Many considerations that are typically left out in a movie are here in front. So, little by little, everything becomes a game with the audience, an invitation to join my attempt to make a movie about a guy looking for a new Map for love: for life. In this long process certain fiction film techniques were useful. But this should not mislead us: if there is any doubt about the nature of the film, please classify it in the “cinema of reality”.