África 815

The Super-8 film could be a generic film of all families: on a beach with seagulls overhead, a man holds a baby in his arms. Today, this baby, now a woman, films her father sleeping. Based on the memoirs he wrote and photos of his trips to North Africa, Pilar Monsell revisits the past of this Spanish army doctor. Posted to a North African colony in 1964, he writes about “the increasingly erotic relationships between patients and doctors”. This life-changing experience was to become the model for a series of great homosexual passions in his life. The film never puts the revelation of this family secret on show: when it is turned into a film, desires have already been felt, spoken, written. Working on the sea and desert as her father’s inner landscapes and giving a voice-over “reading” of his life, Pilar Monsell draws a portrait full of empathy. Torn between the love for his family and the intensity of amorous encounters with men, Manuel Monsell suffers from his attraction to exoticism. The beauty of África 815 lies in visiting with him this imaginary that resembles a paradise lost, then returning with him, here and now—to the bedroom of a man past seventy who is taking his medicine. (Charlotte Garson)