FESCAAAL 2024. The review of El viento que arrasa

The young Leni observes the interior of an evangelical church from a crack between two wooden planks. In the center of the room, full of faithful arranged in a circle, stands her father. He is performing an exorcism on a demon-possessed woman. He is an evangelical preacher and his mission “on behalf of God”, as some would say, is accomplished by erasing the “pain of the soul” of the sick people he meets on his path.

There is a strong relationship between Leni and her father. Her mother fled to Brazil years earlier and only the two of them remained. There are those who even mistake them for husband and wife… They travel together and her daughter helps her father as best she can in her mission. Even though he has traveled a lot, however, Leni has never really known the world outside of what his father taught him. A man who never misses an opportunity to spread the Word, building and shaping his own truth with great eloquence. Leni is, in fact, the main victim of a sea of ​​terms that hit her, day after day, since she was very little. But all these words, verses and prayers cannot block the human curiosity of an eighteen-year-old girl. And so, during yet another evangelical mission, while she is in a hi-fi shop, intent on buying some cassettes to record some sermons, her eye falls on a rock record. The seller leaves it to her for free and Leni takes it right away.

A few days later another meeting, this time completely casual, with Gringo, an atheist mechanic who has never followed the voice of God, and his son, will lead her to a progressive awakening from the ecumenical torpor in which she has found herself since she was born , to arrive at a real path of growth and emancipation from the figure of the father-preacher, a man who has never really been a real father figure.

Paula Hernández, in her third feature film behind the camera, presents an intimate and intriguing road movie at the 33rd FESCAAAL, a transposition of Selva Almada’s novel, set among the boundless plains of the Argentine countryside, a few steps from the border with Brazil. The journey undertaken by the young Leni, starting from the voyeurism of a gaze that begins to distance itself from the “prison of the spirit” represented by her father, will lead her to a gradual awareness of her own identity, destined to lead to the musical explosion of life , expressed with great simplicity in the heartfelt final sequence.

The director adopts a classic style playing with Iván Gierasinchuk’s photography which intercepts the reflections of light that strike the protagonists’ bodies transversally between closed and open environments. The rhythm of the film develops without any particular hitches, showing some empty passages only in its final part. Decidedly more clumsy and rambling is the attempt to adopt a horror twist to describe the definitive separation between Leni and the religious fanaticism of her father. However, there remains a small pause within a well-constructed and developed artistic product, a coming of age declined in the feminine, constantly poised between sacred and profane.