AQUÍ © Leopardo Filmes - Victor Torres
Aquí: Tiago Guedes adapts J. M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize in Literature
The Portuguese filmmaker returns to the Festival four years after Traces (Remains of the Wind) and presents Aquí at Cannes Première, an adaptation of the Jesus Trilogy by Nobel Prize in Literature winner J. M. Coetzee.
Aquí is set in a curious place where everyone has left their past and identity behind them. In this new land, Simón takes responsibility for David, a child who has lost his mother. They identify a woman named Inès in this non-place who might well serve as a potential mother figure for the boy. Together, they form a sort of makeshift family, but David resists…
“I filmed this state of exile as post-modern historical amnesia. Simón and Inés try to anchor David in a world without models, but it is the child who, through a Quixotic figure, claims the power of inconsistency and myth.”
Forlorn characters with no backgrounds and the dizzying shock of the unfamiliar are two of the themes that struck Tiago Guedes when reading Coetzee. The Portuguese filmmaker insisted on capturing the language of the Australian, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, and “his unusual ability to say a lot with very little”.
He recreated the author’s so-called non-place in Spain, using a range of filming locations to blur geographical identification and reflect this territory with neither a past nor a memory. It was there that Tiago Guedes directed Manolo Solo (seen in Victor Erice’s Fermer les yeux (Close your Eyes), Cannes Première in 2023), Patricia López Arnaiz, and the young Álex Peláez, accompanied by other Spanish and French actors including Sergi Lopez and Lambert Wilson.
