• Lead actor Ivan Peric will talk about the film with the audience attending today’s screening at Cine Yelmo Las Arenas Screen 6, which has meant director Travis Wilkerson’s return to the Festival’s Official Section, where he competed in 2022 for a Lady Harimaguada
• The film will be screened again tomorrow, Friday 26, at 8:30 p.m.
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Thursday, April 25, 2024. Through the Graves the Wind Is Blowing (Travis Wilkerson, USA, 2024, 84 min.) is “a hybrid” that combines fiction and documentary with touches of black humor while addressing Croatia’s relationship with fascism and mass tourism problems. A perfect metaphor for a country doomed to deal with its troubled history, the film is competing in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival’s Official Feature Films Section after passing through the Berlinale, where it was “very well received,” according to Ivan Peric, who stars in the feature and will talk about it with the audience this Thursday evening, April 25, at 6:00 p.m. at Cine Yelmo Las Arenas Screen 6.
This feature film set in the city of Split, where the disintegration of Yugoslavia left a deep mark, will be screened again on Friday, April 26, at 8:30 p.m. at Cine Yelmo Las Arenas Screen 7. Starring Peric as a detective with whom he shares a name and who investigates the murder of several tourists, the film also tells the story of a filmmaker interested in the country’s situation (played by Wilkerson himself) while establishing a dialogue between both of them that interweaves present and past through images.
“Travis has a very peculiar style that relies heavily on narrative. He is a pretty talented person who manages to mix very well those images with the narration and, in the end, ends up having a even funnier mixture in which serious issues such as neo-fascism alternate with comedy,” said the lead actor of this film, whose result fits what the director and he intended: to connect all these points “in an unusual way.”
In addition to the rise of extreme nationalism, mass tourism and how it affects the life of the city’s inhabitants is the other main issue the feature film approaches. According to Peric, filmmaker turned actor for this work, they combined fictional elements with real facts despite “not having a script as such;” that’s why part of the text was improvised as they were shooting the film, which originated in the friendship both filmmakers forged in Croatia during the pandemic in the “funniest” way.
They met thanks to their wives’ chance encounter in a supermarket: the Rotterdam Festival logo led the two women to talk about their husbands’ professions. Because of that Wilkerson proposed to Peric to make the film, which was originally intended to be played by a larger cast of actors and actresses. However, a working trip to China the American director had to make accelerated everything and reduced their available shooting time, so they ended up deciding Peric would be the one to play the detective.
A decision that has provided their work with autobiographical elements which inspired Peric’s character, because, among other reasons, Split is also his hometown. Thus, he has witnessed himself many of the events reflected on this work, thanks to which Travis Wilkerson has returned to the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival after having already competed in the same section in 2022 with Nuclear Family.
Through the Graves the Wind Is Blowing, a title taken from the song “The Partisan” by Leonard Cohen, is premiering in Spain as part of the Film Festival. It previously appeared at the Berlinale, where it was well received by the audience, according to Ivan Peric. “It’s something unusual. The film is loaded with swastikas everywhere, there is Nazi symbology, which had its origin in Germany,” a country where, he recalled, “unfortunately, there are also neo-Nazi organizations that are on the rise”. Despite this, “we saw how people responded favorably and laughed at the funny parts.”
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