Dress Rehearsal for Utopia

The filmmaker, whose personal essay/experimental travel journal Color Runaway Dog was screened at IFFR last year, once again links autobiographic drama and general, politico-cultural concepts. It all starts with a trip to Mozambique to seek film material shot there. Experimental documentary maker Andrés Duque visits Mozambique, looking for old footage that had been made there. But strange premonitions make him sad. When it becomes apparent that his old father is seriously ill, he returns to his homeland of Venezuela straight away. The film he had been working on grows into a personal collage in which he gives his feelings a place alongside the politically tinted images he found in Mozambique - or filmed himself. In this way, Dress Rehearsal for Utopia turns into a diary cum experimental travelogue cum political statement, in the tradition of earlier works such as Color Runaway Dog, which was screened last year in Rotterdam. After an intimate start and a cultural trip to Mozambique, Duque returns home, where he has to face the fact that he can’t change anything about the finiteness of life. The musical soundtrack is sometimes interrupted for scenes by a gentle rustling noise that links the different images, their origins and significance together.