Fantasia Fest 2021
All the Moons
Directed by Igor Legarreta
Written by Legarreta and Jon Sagalá
Starring Haizea Carneros, Josean Bengoetxea, Itziar Ituño
Running time 1 hour, 42 minutes
Currently unrated but contains depictions of violence, war, death and undeath
By Hunter Bush
If you’ve been wondering when someone would make a vampire movie that feels like something you haven’t seen many times before, Igor Legarreta’s All the Moons might be what you’ve been searching for. Melancholy and beautiful, it treads familiar ground analyzing the emotional toll that eternal life would take on a person’s emotional growth, but with a patience and gentleness mostly unheard of in vampire cinema. More a tragedy than a horror movie, All the Moons is not to be missed.
I don’t mean to make All the Moons out to sound miserable - it absolutely isn’t. It’s a lovely film about wanting to live and to be a part of the world seen through the eyes of a young girl (Haizea Carneros) given a second chance at life when she’s rescued from a fatal injury by a mysterious woman (Itziar Ituño).
An aspect of the movie’s appeal to me is that its setting, when combined with director Legaretta’s lyrical imagery gives the movie the feeling of a fairy tale or a fable. The film takes place in the 1870s in northern Spain, giving the movie the bucolic setting that’s traditionally part and parcel with the phrase “Once upon a time…”. Another fascinating aspect of the location is that the cast are speaking Basque, a language only spoken along the Pyrenees mountain range between northern Spain and southern France and that unusual sounding dialect actually adds to the magical, otherworldly feeling of the picture.
The young girl, who eventually comes by the name Amaia, ends up in a small religious town, in the care of a man named Candido (Joseann Bengoetxea) whose family had passed away some time before and, inverting everything you associate with vampire lore, instead of taking a life, she restores it. Metaphorically of course, and it’s beautiful.
The story unfolds more in a world of emotions than logic, so occasionally things just happen and you have no choice but to roll with them and see where they lead but even that adds to the magical, dreamlike spell the movie casts. Ultimately All the Moons tells a story whose moral is that suffering is an unfortunate part of life, but a necessary one. Would you appreciate the good times without the bad ones for contrast? Of course, like all fables this is probably open to your own interpretation.
All the Moons screens at the Cinéma Impérial on August 19th and digitally on the 20th. Check the Fantasia Fest 2021 site for ticket information.
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