Translucent colour planes set against porous ink strokes in rich black, idiosyncratic perspectives and expressive animation – this is the signature style that has made Isabel Herguera’s more recent films unmistakeable. Three film programmes and a masterclass offer insights into her creative practice.
Carrying her sketchbook, the Spaniard Inés travels to India to visit her mentally ill friend Ámár. Their reunion is harmonious and touching, but the mood turns. The city where Ámár lives, the house and his room become mirrors of Inés’s inner experience and tell of an unbearable state between affection and disgust in intense colours and textures.
A film about a child with a passion: The little girl loves everything that flies high. She lets herself being pushed on the swing until she is almost out of the frame, and she loves her new balloon. But then she gets caught in the clutches of a bird dealer who locks her up in his flat on the top floor of a high-rise. The only way out is through the window.
Insects of various species gather. They install a stage on which a frenzy of colours and textures unravels. We encounter strange figures in the verse-like segments of this animated experiment. The visual associations arise from a sound piece by Xabier Erkizia that he composed for an interview with the musician Santiago Irigoyen, who died in 2007.
A van approaches the lighthouse of Monte Igueldo on the bay off San Sebastián. A woman and her dog live in the tower. The moving boxes are packed with files and paper. Before the driver can load them, we are given access to the unusual interior of the building, where the history of seafaring and conquests rears its head: in hallucinated picture puzzles full of cruelty.
The ringing of a phone segues into the soundscape of a big city. The buzzing of cars mingles with the sounds of a football match. Provoked by a cat, a blind person’s assistance dog breaks free and carries us over into a world whose spatial dimensions are almost impossible to grasp. A journey begins in which the senses are faced with new challenges.
In early 2020, the lockdown has brought the world to a halt. Homes become space stations, hermetically sealed off from the outside world. Nobody goes out, only the thoughts go wandering. Students of seven international universities exchange personal impressions of and reflections on this forced isolation online and get to know each other through this joint project.
A music video realised as a sand animation and visualising the eponymous rap song of the Mestizo band Ojos de Brujo from their 2002 album “Barí”. Swirling, merging, powerfully rhythmic images materialise in the flow of sand. The energetic beats and the haunting vocals carry a tale of greed and deceit that we follow as if in a trance.
This animated short film documents a workshop with Mehndi artists in Ahmedabad. While the women work together to create phantastic forms in henna colours, they tell their tutor Isabel Herguera what they dream of: flying, for example, a women’s parliament, or a journey to Switzerland. Samira longs for independence – and makes herself heard with a rap.
Former fighters of the Colombian FARC guerilla report in letters on their most formative experiences from their time in the armed underground. University students from three continents adapt these personal memories in a parallel collective process to develop a touching film whose visual joy of experimentation is impressive.
Spurred by an extremely convincing young man with an American accent, the spirits of the dead rise from their graves in a Mexican cemetery and set out to cross the wall to the United States. This ghost story from 1994 gives us goosebumps with its topicality and enchants with its wit, shimmering colours and vibrant shapes.
Tattooed skin, harbour music, the horror of a shipwreck, the fog bells of a lighthouse, the changing of the tides. This film about the glorious and deadly ocean, which pulls you down into the depths of the sea, is the result of an interoceanic workshop that uses the creative mechanisms of the cadavre exquis technique. An intuitive tale arises from a collective act of creation.
Isabel Herguera herself welcomes us in the title sequence of this autobiographical short film and gives us a brief glimpse behind the scenes of her work as an artist. Right after that, we join her on a fast-paced trip through the part of her family history that begins with the birth of her brothers in 1965 and ends with the death of General Franco in 1975.
