D’A Film Festival 2024 Dispatch & ‘Animals’ Review

D’A Film Festival 2024 Dispatch: An Indie Space Straight From the Heart

 Now celebrating its 14th edition, Barcelona’s D’A Film Festival is making its name as the most heartfelt of the year’s festivals.

“I imagine my films as piazzas, this space I must occupy entirely with my ideas,” director Alice Rohrwacher says in her lilting Italian after winning the D’A Award, the D’A Film Festival’s prestigious honorary prize, where her appearance was accompanied by a screening of her latest film, the Josh O’Connor-starring La Chimera. This liminal piazza space that exists in Rohrwacher’s mind is something that all directors competing in this year’s D’A line-up have in common — the imagination to invent spaces wherein your soul and the soul of what you’re trying to capture are woven like a kitchen cloth. The core of this year’s D’A is films straight from the homemade heart.

Barcelona’s D’A Film Festival began in 2011, organized by the film distribution and publicity team of the Spanish film distributor Noucinemart. The festival’s goal is to provide the bustling cinephile community of Barcelona with access to workshops, premieres, and screenings of the greatest in popular and up-and-coming movies, as well as give cinematic creatives a platform for their work to be seen and felt by this audience of cinema lovers, who make the annual pilgrimage to the stunning beach town.

For the 14th installment of the Catalonian capital’s film festival, directors from around the world flooded the impossibly sunny streets of Barcelona to show their masterpieces. Animal by Greek director Sofia Exarchou is a gripping drama about the unraveling of a dance instructor at a Greek beach resort; the legendary French director Catherine Breillat stopped by to screen her latest film, the age-gap drama Last Summer; and representing the United States were Joanna Arnow with her hit The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed and Lucy Kerr’s Family Portrait, an inevitably ambient exercise in magical realism and conservative culture.

There was, of course, a plethora of local talent too, including queer auteur Marc Ferrer’s Reír, cantar, tal vez llorar, a heartfelt take on trans identity and the racist undertones that permeate modern Catalan society. The premiere for Ferrer’s film felt like the most generous and vibrant celebration of love in the abstract, freedom of self, and personal queerness, and it made me feel so intrinsically connected to every stranger I passed. The festival also featured red carpet events such as the world premiere of the highly anticipated Spanish Disney+ miniseries Las Largas Sombras (screening on Hulu in the US as Past Lies), which brought powerhouse director Clara Roquet together with an ensemble cast including the legendary Spanish actress Elena Anaya for a spectacular meditation on queer love and the lengths of feminine rage. 

Overall, this year’s D’A felt triumphant. As the festival finds its footing as a soon-to-be international film festival, D’A makes itself known as the most tenderly woven out of all the cinematic showcases. Next year, we hope for more magic from our friends on the Spanish coastline.

D’A Film Festival Review: ‘Animal’ Offers Haunting Glimmers of Freedom in Greece

 Director Sofia Exarchou crafts a ghost story on a Greek island resort wherein all the action occurs in the subtext.

“You order, I dance,” instructs Khalia (Dimitra Vlagopoulou), the electrifyingly spasmodic dancer around whom the tenderly weaved story of Animal revolves. It is in this unexpectedly intimate moment during a one-night stand with Austrian tourist Jonas (Voodoo Jürgens) when Khalia’s unraveling is on full display, and so is the prowess of the film’s writer-director Sofia Exarchou. Her spectacular sophomore feature Animal, which she presented at Barcelona’s D’A Film Festival, is a grippingly intimate portrait that pulls at the tucked-away threads of hidden humanity that we hide behind walls we forget to take down, even for ourselves.

With stills of hot Greek summers in its promotional materials, Animal seemed slated to be an exploration of youth and personhood against the backdrop of wild abandon, something that immediately piqued my interest. What I found instead was a film that occurred entirely in subtext — a first for me. Animal, at its core, is a ghost story.

Animal introduces audiences to Khalia, a vibrant dance teacher at a hotel on a nondescript Greek island. Night after night, and spectacle after spectacle, she interacts with guests with an air of uncomplicatedness, as if just being around other people gives her enough energy to power a thousand suns. But off-stage, her life exists as a monotonous cycle: getting ready for a new performance, choreographing routines, engaging in mild flirtations with the guests (not too much to make them hooked, but just enough to keep them interested), and a wavering sexual relationship with the hotel’s emcee Simos (Ahilleas Hariskos), a dangerously lively and borderline predatory man.

Khalia feels like a ghost in her own life. She goes through the motions with her emotional needs not only unfulfilled but unrecognized, and only comes to any semblance of life onstage — and even then, her mask isn’t painted well enough to disguise her hollow core. Khalia’s unraveling begins as she sustains an injury to her leg (a literal wound to the perfect marble of the statue she’s made herself to be), which leads her on an ultimately eye-opening path of destructive sex, an overload of alcohol, and unexpected intimacy in the gaze of a handsome stranger.

Exarchou casts the star location — a hotel that, in any other lens, would be chosen for its glitter and opulence — in shades of gray. The performers live in dreary concrete buildings about the width of a trailer, and the hotel seems to be falling apart at the seams, with the crew regularly having to take care of their own props and maintenance. Even the common usage of scooters and motorcycles against the ever-present rolling waves signifies something entirely different here — what you may think is liberation is, deep down, necessity.

Khalia has been at this hotel as a performer (called an “animateur” in the film) for the last 10 years and is heralded as the de facto leader of the bunch of performers, especially when a new group of animateurs joins the hotel. Among them is a young Polish woman, Eva (a star turn by Flomaria Papadaki). Eva is arguably the most fascinating character in the film, serving as a foil to Khalia, though not in the ways one might expect. Instead of being wide-eyed and excited by the life around her, Eva feels scared to fully embrace it — a fear that is only outweighed by the bigger fear of being forced to return to the complacency of her native Poland. 

Eva never truly lets her hair down (Papadaki’s face does an incredible job at conveying this outward duplicity), and she is exposed to the harsher realities of life as a performer. One such instance is when fellow performer Thomas (Chronis Barbarian) coerces her into making out and eventually having sex, during which she keeps her wandering blue eyes open and her face frozen. The scene is chilling, and left my blood frozen. Later, after telling Khalia about this instance, she follows it up by recounting a dream in which she is watched by her family while performing in her childhood home. In the dream, her family members suddenly rise to touch and kiss her before their faces stretch and morph to resemble those of animals. This emotional beat is hit so succinctly and intelligently that it’s here that the audience understands what is at stake for Eva — she’s playing a game of survival, not frivolity.

The heart of the film is the presence of Mary (Danai Petropoulea), Simos’s little blonde daughter. The movie’s flirtation with innocence starts and ends with Mary; it draws you into the movie as it begins, as you watch golden-hued images of a barefoot child in a tutu splashing carelessly in the water, the droplets so bright I actually flinch when they touch the camera. At every point she is shown, Mary provides equal groundedness and levity to the narrative, especially for the tired, monotonous, and self-scorned Khalia, who is a funhouse mirror. Khalia and Mary’s relationship is a source of fascination: while Exarchou keeps Mary’s mother’s identity purposefully ambiguous, Khalia treats the girl not as maternally as a stepmother, but rather with a sort of removed tenderness. It’s as if there were some invisible layer of personal insecurity holding her back from totally embracing the girl — and perhaps, deep down, her own innocence — in order to move on from this stage of her life.

Exarchou’s sophomore feature provides an intrinsic emotional depth that keeps you completely suspended in the scenes of this ghost story. She does what so many directors fail to do: she respects the intelligence of her audience. Not a single thing is handed to you in Animal; you must maintain a keen awareness of the subtle changes on the actors’ faces and comb through the dialogue as you hear it. An entirely subtextual film is only heightened by Exarchou’s masterful emotional intelligence, cementing her status as one of the most promising rising filmmakers.