Futures Market

Mercado de futuros

Spain

2011

113 Min

Color

1.85:1

Spanish, Catalan, English

Currently 3.6/5 Stars.
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SCR Arturo Redin, Mercedes Álvarez

ED Núria Esquerra, Pablo Gil Rituerto

MUSIC Sergio Renán

BAFICI (International Competition): Special Mention, Rotterdam (Spectrum)

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

Mercedes Álvarez

Born in 1966, Mercedes Álvarez is a graduate from Barcelona’s Universidad Pompeu Fabra. She has been teaching there since 1998. She was the editor of José Luis Guerín’s documentary En Construction (2001). She has shot the short film El Viento Africano in 1997 and the feature documentary El Cielo Gira (Le Ciel tourne) in 2004, Grand prize Cinéma du Réel 2005, distributed in France by ID distribution. —Cinéma du réel

răpciune

31Mar13

probably one of the most surprising and interesting questions in film: how does market overflow produce the inflation of memory, by depreciating the objects that carry the trace and are associated with that memory? it is not about the bare idolatry of things, as in the bourgeois mindset, but about a function, that of a symbolic support, hopelessly eroding with the continuous, insane quest for the new. memory is

răpciune

31Mar13

like loyalty, it attaches itself to one thing at a time. if the modern means of production have destroyed the authority of art, it is questionable if they didn't also, to some extent, suppress individual memory in what defines it as memory: its ability to last.

Matt Richards

11Feb13

An intriguing and evocative fly-on-the wall style documentary that inter-cuts between a share trading office, a property speculator's conference and a scrap market. There is a minimal voice over offering little mantras to be mulled over during the ensuing sections that can be very effective. We are asked to question our sense of place and purpose and memory in an engaging and non-prescriptive manner. 3.5 stars