New hybrid stories in Spanish fiction cinema. The case of Entre dos aguas by Isaki Lacuesta

Abstract

At the 2018 San Sebastian Festival the winning film was Entre dos aguas (Isaki Lacuesta, 2018). The Catalan filmmaker constructs a fiction film that, however, is also very much self-referential and biographical and therefore journalistic (all the actors are amateurs who play themselves in the film), and uses a good part of a certain journalistic documentary visual aesthetic. These actors, in turn, had already been protagonists for 12 years before another film by the filmmaker, La leyenda del tiempo (2006). However, the value of Lacuesta's contribution lies in the fact that these characters play a life they did not live, but could easily have. In his proposal, reality is mixed with fiction in a film where both are equally plausible. The analysis of this footnote will also allow us to identify many of the characteristics of the new contemporary hybrid cinema, such as the cohabitation with objectivity, the deontology of the creator, the breaking of the frontiers between fiction and non-fiction, or the use of a certain ucrony within the script that inserts his characters (with varying degrees of luck) into their natural environment. We intend to analyze how this new hybrid film language allows a different knowledge of the environment, with all the implications that this implies.