Faust
(Fausto)

Shot entirely in 16mm, with a very light crew, Faust delves into the myths and traces of a past buried in the nooks and crannies of a village on Mexico’s Pacific coast. The story of its inhabitants – or witnesses – is sometimes recounted, completed or fantasised by a loquacious and bewitching voiceover. Yet, under this flow of words that seems to weave the film’s structure, its web, it is in the images brimming with nocturnal colours, shadows and opaque materials that Faust’s project is revealed. As in the works of Mexican author Juan Rulfo, real people seem much more ghostly than the phantoms whose story they tell. The documentary material is cloaked in a fantastic, even mystical dimension. In small brush strokes, this shapes a film that acts as a sensory defence of what we could call archaism, since the film works on the metaphor of an invisible yet still present people, who to protect themselves against colonial times, have learnt from nocturnal animals how to see in the dark. And this keeps them from being tamed, and from death. MM