“Aqueronte”, a film by Manuel Muñoz Rivas, is one of the four films showing in the Hot Docs Made in Spain Shorts Programme screening on 3May2024. Despite the fact it is not a documentary short it is a short of a mystical voyage of light, sound and images your mind can journey on with.
A group of passengers of various types and ages travel on a ferry with their cars on a journey that seems of endless duration. It departs in the darkness and ends in the darkness. Snippets of conversations including several on death and grave illness add to the mystery. Some children speak of Charon and another puts coins in his eyes as is the custom with the deceased in many countries. Ancient Greeks put coins in the eyes of the deceased to ensure Charon, receiving full payment, ferried them to their after-death destination. Should they not pay they would be stranded in between the world of the living and dead. One of the children on the ferry queries where Charon is taking them.
The passengers arrive in the dark at their destination. What that destination is best left to your imagination. There is no spoon feeding of the viewer here.
Rivas speaks of the film, “When I first approached the location where later I would shoot my film “Aqueronte”, the river Guadalquivir and more specifically the ferry boat that crosses it, I was struck by the aesthetic characteristics of the scene. Everything that I identify as defining elements of cinema was there: movement, faces, bodies, landscape,
sound atmospheres, light and shadow, reverie, the visible and the latent force of the invisible… all present in the raw material with which to shape fragments of time and space.
Because ultimately that is what we filmmakers do: compose with fragments of time and fragments of space.“
You can watch the trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqZ9W8MZibU
RKS 2024 Film Rating: 92/100.
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