Lúa vermella

In a coastal town in Galicia, Rubio, a fisherman and diver who had rescued many people disappears into the waters of the sea. Perhaps due to a sea monster making an ominous sound. The disappearance plunges the people into a static state, of paralysis. The settlers request the help of three meigas (Galician witches) to get out of the spell and recover the Rubio.

Lois Patiño's film is unclassifiable. A succession of images of incredible pictorial beauty, with voice-overs from different settlers and their hypotheses about the state of things, in a slow but hypnotic story that rescues ancient popular myths of Galicia.

Participated in the 35th Mar del Plata Film Festival

Philosophy:

Red Moon Tide is a meditative existential waking nightmare. It calls upon the meditation of existence, morality, and reason. Through single frames it covers the universal singularity. Calamity, loneliness, and despair... all on full display. It's most frightening aspect is what the film questions and doesn't resolve.

The open void of existence, and its apparent senselessness. Our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives.

There is no thought without reason, no morality without truth. No clear understanding of what nothingness equates to, (aka the voided vaccume of space and time). What's beyond, if there's a beyond? It's relativity, and simultaneous ambiguity, puts reality into question.

The film mocks reality, and confronts it's meaninglessness. Call it, terrifying, and staggeringly beautiful.

This film will haunt you. With the truth that there is no truth. To reject all beliefs is in fact a belief. Summarized by the fact that we are the joke... don't laugh. That is the paradox.. you must confront.

Logic dictates that life is simultaneously meaningless and meaningful at the same time. You cannot accept one without accepting the other. If life's only meaning is that it's meaningless. Is that still meaningful? ... Meaningless cannot be identified without indirectly giving it meaning. That is why everything is interconnected. It's our brain and the illusion of self - that creates, separation.

Thought, idea, atoms, life itself. Randomness, order, morality, reason, despair. Truth, objectivity, subjectivity... thought.. an idea.. ... bigger than life itself. A universal singularity represented in single frames, a meditative waking nightmare.. a Red Moon Tide...Art? An idea... Call it Bigger than... life itself.

Beautifully shot and composed, including some striking images - I particularly liked the shots of the interior of the dam.

To be honest, i can not see any message which is mentioned inside of the movie. Visually stunning and some of moments are highly impressed but that's all.

A masterpiece. A pictorial disguised as a cinema or moving images that in their statism become landscapes.

«Lúa vermella» is not a conventional movie. It tells a fable of the sea through images and voices, without acting, inspired by the real story of Rubio de Camelle, a diver who rescues the corpses of shipwrecked sailors, lost under the sea of Costa da Morte, a region in Galicia that, during the Roman Empire, was considered the end of the world.

Rubio has been swallowed by the sea. Or by "the Beast". And the village is desolate, immobile, scared. The mother resorts to mirrors to talk with her dead son, but she achieves nothing, until three "meigas" (witches, magicians) suddenly arrive and initiate a series of rites to end the situation, including covering the inhabitants with white sheets.

To create his audiovisual fable, Patiño involved two communities. In most of the shots, the inhabitants of the coastal village, plagued by their beliefs about Evil (some say it is the sea, others say it is the Moon, and others believe it is a sea monster) are practically immobile, so that the film is a succession of works of art, as if they were paintings. The cinematography by Patiño himself is superlative, including the submarine images, which he shot in Baja California, México.

The son of two well-known painters from Galicia, Lois Patiño has a marked influence from the plastic arts, but one also recognizes the influence of Stanley Kubrick or Akira Kurosawa. «Lúa vermella» is great cinema that mixes resources from fiction, documentary, experimental cinema, horror films and music videos. A word of caution: if you are sleepy, do not watch it, because it relaxes in such a way that it induces sleep.