Red Moon Tide

Life has come to a standstill in a town on the Galician coast. Only moonlight flickers on the waves in the bay; seaweed floats on the water; and lonely, abandoned animals wander the dark streets. The residents have frozen motionless as if in a catatonic state. They stand still in their homes, gardens, on the streets, in the port, and at the strange rocks that sank the boat Rubio. When a sailor drowns, a sea monster awakens from the depths and casts a curse upon the village. At least, that’s what the local legend says. We can see it in the form of drawings on the edges of an old map. The film by the Spanish artist Lois Patiño is a version of the story that we know from Sleeping Beauty. The world has fallen asleep, the time of people has stopped, only the world of nature lives according to its own rhythm. Although everything looks rather contemporary, the town has been sleeping for a thousand years already. Red Moon Tide is a folk fairy tale and, at the same time, an ethnographic film: a portrait of a fishing village, its best days already behind it. It is also a blood-curdling avant-garde horror like the stories whispered by Galician sailors about dangerous rocks, the bodies of drowned men, the devil’s herb, and the blood-red moon.