The Fire is Coming

Amodo, accused of arson, is released from prison, but no one is waiting for him. He returned to his hometown, a village in the mountains of Galicia where forest fires occur most frequently in Europe, and lived with his eighty-three-year-old mother and three cows. Across the wet, cold and gloomy winter, Amodo lived slowly and slowly according to the rhythm of nature. The once dry life gradually stretched out in the spring breeze and midsummer sunshine, until the forest was getting closer and closer, and the mountains were covered with fire again... Director Olivier Russey returned to the Spanish mountain village where he played as a child to complete this fateful poem that spans four seasons. Featuring familiar local amateurs as protagonists, with ritualistic camera movements and super-16mm film textures, he gazes at this mountainous landscape, which he calls "extremely beautiful, high-contrast and unpredictable". The tranquility gathers awe-inspiring energy; while human innocence and suspicion, natural changes and extinctions, the insignificance and impermanence of life, and the overwhelming raging fire, burst out with scorching heat. The power of the images rivals that of Béla Tarr and Tarkovsky.