Las variaciones Marker (2007)

　　At Gijón 2007, Lacuesta (Girona, 1975) had the opening of his film The Marker Variations, meditations on the cinema of Chris Marker (Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, 1921) and his way of looking at faces, of thinking the wor...展开ld, of portraying the 20th Century. Almost all the images in Lacuesta's film were shot by Marker (which is to say they were taken from the French director's filmography); and even some sequences in this film, according to a line of reasoning which would be complicated to explain here, were edited by Marker himself. In the November issue of Cahiérs du Cinéma in its Spanish edition, Lacuesta explained: "Filmmakers in spite of everything, the heirs of the man with the movie camera won't even need this to go on making films". The Marker Variations proves it: the director without a camera gets on that fleeting time line called cinema and carries the names of Vertov and Eisenstein and, of course, Marker, the inventors of unstoppable images. A bit like Borges in The Garden of Forking Paths, Isaki assumes that "the future already exists", and that there are many films which can (and must) be made from that assumption.
　　"If Isaki Lacuesta wants to use some of my footage, that's ok by me, at the end of the day, I have spent my life copying others" (Chris Marker). An act of cinematic love for the director of La Jetée. "To shoot under the pseudonym Chris Marker, you need to fulfill a few requirements, some very strange. The Markers are a secret sect who meet up only once a year... And cameras are forbidden at the meeting".
　　Isaki Lacuesta was born in Girona in 1975. His first feature, Cravan vs Cravan (2002, screened at Bafici 2003), received the Best New Director and audience awards at the Sitges festival. His second feature, La leyenda del tiempo (2006, seen at that year's Bafici), was presented in the official section of the Rotterdam festival, and awarded in many international festivals (Nantes, Tubingen, Yerevan, Las Palmas, and Guayaquil, among others).