Red Moon Tide

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.