Futures Market

The second film by Mercedes Álvarez –winner of BAFICI 2005 with The Sky Turns– is a sort of essay about the life of objects. We see them while they’re still unborn (a real estate convention offering properties not yet built in faraway places) or rather at the very last moments of their useful life (the process of emptying a family’s house and the fate of the things that were inside create a quietly beautiful sequence it’s hard to see without getting involved). There are also immaterial objects, like dreams that can appear in the shape of modern marketing and self-affirmation seminars. And there’s also symbols, which are good for providing value but can also be bought themselves in a ceremony where the only thing we can’t see is the object of the operation. There are also things we usually don’t regard as objects but somehow are. Everything can switch owners. The motto here is permanent circulation and nostalgia, a trace of weakness that echoes a prior state of human development. The film addresses all those things, and it does so with some superb framings. –BAFICI