Berlin International Film Festival 2000

by Agusti Villaronga

Something awful, you sense, happened to Catalan director Agustí Villaronga as a child. His films all turn on the damage wreaked on the young and innocent by a Nazi paedophile (his debut, Tras El Cristal, 1985, a kind of truly shocking Night Porter); by an institution for telepathic children (El Niño De La Luna, 1988); by a shadowy mafia (Le Passager Clandestin, 1995) and by psychic experiments (99.9, 1997).

As ever with Villaronga, The Sea is a horror film, but dressed in another visual guise, here a period pic. Set in Mallorca around the time of the Civil War, two boys witness an execution, the subsequent revenge and a schoolmate's suicide.

Ten years later they meet again in a tuberculosis sanitorium and Villaronga begins to tramp his home ground: hidden desire, religious obsession, death, homosexuality and delirious fantasy.

"The Sea has been one of my most secret and treasured projects for more than 20 years," he confesses. "In a sense, making The Sea has been about looking at my roots: my homeland Mallorca, my childhood and the subjects that move me."

John Hopewell