UK Premiere

Short Synopsis:

A love story between a Mexican teenager and an older American woman who meet one summer in Mexico, told through still images.

Review:

Jonas Cuarón 's latest experimental feature is strangely compelling. By assimilating photographs from a year-long stay in Mexico City (and a brief spell in New York) into a fictional narrative, Cuarón both challenges the conventional means of presenting cinematic fantasy and blurs the line between documentary and fiction. His film is essentially a slideshow; black and white photographs whose content is explained by an ongoing voiceover of both dialogue and inner monologues.
 
What is particularly striking about ‘Año Uña’ is its ambition. As well as challenging the classic structure of cinematic storytelling, Cuarón proceeds to both comment on the cultural differences between Mexico and their geographical neighbours the United States, and explore the complex nature of maturation.
The story follows Molly, a twenty-year old American college student who - whilst on vacation in Mexico - develops a tentative friendship with a fourteen-year old local named Diego. Diego, like a dog in heat, lusts after everyone but only longs for her. Their relationship is not especially torrid or epic, but rather painfully realistic and remarkably compelling.
 
Cuarón so successfully pulls off this potentially alienating structure that you often forget that you’re only watching photographs. The dialogue is firmly grounded in reality; the inner-monologues accentuate and intensify the more important verbal interactions, the shifts in tone revitalise the film and the photographs themselves are beautiful, brilliant and, on occasion, need no voiceover.
 
ZB

* Jonas and Alfonso Cuaron will be present for a Q&A after the screening.