Between Two Waters

In 2006 Isaki Lacuesta made The Legend of Time (shown at New Horizons), a fictionalized documentary about two Roma brothers who must quickly grow up after the tragic death of their father. In the moving drama of Between Two Waters, the director returns to his heroes 12 years later, showing the different paths of their fates. Israel, the younger of the two, is just getting out of prison. He wants to start all over again, but it is difficult to get a job in unemployment plagued Andalusia. He feels that apart from drugs, imprisonment and death, his hometown has little to offer. His older brother, Cheíto, a sailor whose life is far from carefree, tries to turn him from the road to perdition. Awarded with the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, Lacuesta's film is intimate, focused on characters, their gestures and bodies, and at the same time expressive like flamenco and epic in showing more than a decade of the siblings' lives. Drawing a social landscape of the poor South, the director avoids a condescending tone and charms audiences with the tenderness and respect with which he frames the protagonists. From inconspicuous moments, Lacuesta manages to sketch a melancholy portrait of difficult brotherly love and a snapshot of a crisis of manhood that is unable to keep pace with modernity.