27 horas (1986)
Directed by Montxo Armendáriz
Starring Antonio Banderas and Maribel Verdú Spanish with English subtitles (custom made for this screening)
This drama unfolds on the mist-covered bay of San Sebastián in the Basque region of Spain, and follows the lives of several teenagers with no sense of future. They spend much of their time on the dreary fishing harbour and the run-down promenade, hoping to find odd jobs. To no avail. The two main lovers, Maite and Jon, are already hooked on heroin.
An explosion of junky movies had spread throughout Europe at least since the 70s (i.e. The Girl from the Vondel Park (set here in Amsterdam), and Christiane F. (in Berlin). These off-beat films flooded the cinemas, but today most of them have disappeared off the cinematic map, almost impossible to track down. In fact the entire genre is largely forgotten, as if it never existed.
Out of this wave of heroin films came the exceptional arthouse film 27 horas, which paints San Sebastián as a cold grey city, with a backdrop of political warfare. The movie is not sensationalist, action-packed or oversexed, like many of its predecessors in the long wave of Spanish cine quinqui. It is actually more melancholic, maybe even like a elegiac Greek tragedy. No scary scenes of drug taking, more of a slow and inescapable slide into junkyhood. Starring the equally unavoidable, but here brilliantly directed
Antonio Banderas and Maribel Verdú, side by side with magnificent performances by two unknown
actors: Martxelo Rubio and Jon Donosti.
This will be a high-definition projection.
door open 20:00 | start 20:30
admission 3 euro (cash only), free entrance for Vrienden van Huis De Pinto