PORTALS follows the course of the Guadalete River in Cádiz, Spain, from the mountains to the sea: a catalog of landscapes that hide other landscapes, a collection of interdimensional portals (and postcards) that fuses real action and animation creating an impossible fauna and flora, inventing a new history and geography for a humble waterway.
In Elena Duque’s films, nature is a fibrous, fleshy fabric that the director layers, enriches, colours, sweetens, or scribbles upon, as if trying to discover its unsuspected essences. Sometimes it’s digital, abstracted images preceding live action ones, other times it’s the reverse, the two textures blending richly or fluidly until trees start looking as if they had digital veins. There takes place a process of re-semantization: first a river drawn is drawn as a sketch, then we see a simple line evoking said river, one word evoking a river, and, finally, the river itself. PORTALS exudes an effervescent and lively piece of cinema reminiscent of both Sergei Parajanov’s folk surrealism and Jodie Mack’s stop-motion wonder, The Grand Bizarre. (Georgiana Mușat)
Spanish-Venezuelan Elena Duque is a filmmaker, programmer, critic and teacher. Her experimental and animated pieces have been shown at international festivals such as Rotterdam, Mar del Plata, IndieLisboa, Punto de Vista and DocumentaMadrid, among others, and institutions such as Kino Arsenal or Anthology Film Archives, and her work has also been the subject of monographic sessions at places like the Filmoteca de Catalunya and the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, and festivals such as Valdivia, among others.
