Boyero’s criticism of the film on Cañada Real: “I go in as I go out. I prefer cinema to real life” | Cinema: previews and reviews

Carlos Boyero analyzed director Guillermo Galoe’s film in his latest review. The film is set in Cañada Real, “a dark place in Madrid” according to the film expert, thus referring to the largest irregular settlement in Europe and which is located in this community. The work on which he expresses his opinion is City without sleepwhich seems like a mix between fiction and documentary: “I think what I see and feel is real, there is no manipulation of the viewer, but that doesn’t mean I’m passionate or moved by the material.”

Boyero describes the Cañada Real as a complicated environment and explains his references: “I have never visited such a harsh place, but I know people who have passed through there looking for food for their battered veins. That is, hard drugs. And also because of the circumstances of their work. And they say the prospects are bleak.” A plot is filmed there in which the neighbors act as actors and which focuses on the move that a family born and raised here will make into a public housing house.

And while he praises the character of a “disturbing, more intelligent than hungry” girl, and the atmosphere created, he believes that he needs something more and that the film fails to give it to him: “My mood doesn’t change during the screening. I go in the same way I go out. Nothing that particularly moves me.” “That everything seems or is real, that they are filming a piece of reality, I don’t consider it the essential value of cinema. I’m willing to believe lies if I can get involved in what they tell me”, he concludes.

If you want to read Carlos Boyero’s full review you can do so by following this link: ‘City without a dream’: reality, fiction, mix? Unaware of all this.