A film that lifts you up – no flight required!
Gabriel Mascaro’s fourth feature comes packed with the same tactile electricity that coursed through his previous trips, Neon Bull and Divine Love. Acting as a spiritual remake of The Ballad of Narayama, this year’s Berlinale Grand Prize winner imagines a near-future Brazil where the elderly are pushed to the fringes of society — in order to allow the country’s youth to focus more easily on work, their parents are forcibly sent away to a mysterious colony whose location no one really knows. Maybe it exists as the peaceful haven the government promotes (a plane flies daily over the city trailing a banner reading “The future is for everyone”), but rumors that no one has ever returned from there, along with graffiti screaming “Give me my grandpa back,” leave little room for hope. It doesn’t help that a newly enacted law has just lowered the colony's age threshold to 75.
That’s how Tereza, a spirited 77-year-old woman recently declared a “living national treasure” and far from ready to leave her home — or possibly step toward death — finds herself wanting to fulfill one last dream before she’s shipped away in a week: to fly on an airplane. The only problem? Everything she does now needs to be approved by her daughter, who refuses to buy the ticket, even if it’s just for a same-day return flight. So Tereza turns to Cadu, a lonely captain with a rather shady business, who agrees to take her on his boat, The African Queen, to a nearby town where she might catch an illegal flight back. No sooner do they set off along the sun-kissed river — now lined with mountains of tires in place of the rubber-tree grandparents — than they encounter a mysterious snail with a royal blue “slime” said to reveal your future if dropped into your eyes. But is Tereza ready to see what awaits her in the possible-concentration-camp colony?
Her determination to stay in control of her own fate is contagious, and the real odyssey she embarks on changes you in ways you never see coming. Because watching The Blue Trail, with its sun-drenched and neon-lit frames, with its aged faces whose wrinkles whisper stories up close to the camera, is like putting a drop of that “blue slime” into your own eyes. You may not see your future — but you’ll definitely want to change something about it, to have a story worth telling at 77.
Wednesday, June 18, 9:45 PM / Piața Unirii
Wednesday, June 18, 9:45 PM / Parc Poligon Florești
Saturday, June 21, 7:30 PM / Cinema Mărăști