This is a short review of Black Bread (Pa negre) (2010)
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23 October
This is a short review of Black Bread (Pa negre) (2010), as screened
at Cambridge Film Festival 2012 (@Camfilmfest)
Black Bread (2010) has, even allowing for twists and turns, quite a fragile plot, by which I mean one that is susceptible to being betrayed for someone who has not seen it.
It begins with a cart being sent over a cliff, and with Andreu, who has witnessed what has happened, raising the alarm. It is the pivot, did we but know it, for everything that happens, and for Andreu (quietly, yet intensely played by Francesc Colomer) to try to seek out the right things to hate in these troubled times, from his father's caged birds, to distance himself from him, to his cousin Núria, for trying to seduce him when he was too proud and disgusted by her.
For, in boyhood, Andreu is on the edge of manhood, wanting to make the right allegiances, even though his father's previous counter-revolutionary activity has left the family and its livelihood, and his position in life, compromised. Father and mother (embodied by Roger Casamajor and Nora Navas) keep things from him, but he is determined to find them out.
As I said in opening questions from the floor at the Q&A afterwards (to producer Isona Passola), Does a story such as this find its own authentic voice in children as its witnesses, or do they select themselves by their interest in mystery and secrets?
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