Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Me (But Were Afraid to Ask)...

...Greg Smalley Has Asked Me Yet For 366 Weird Movies:

Photo by Susana Ortega

366: You’ve announced a new project, Gallino, which you describe as a”pornophilosophical film.”  What can you tell our readers about the movie?

Atanes: It is a step forward in my rise to weirdness.Gallino is related to my last movie Maximum Shame in many of its subjects. There are different actors and characters, other aesthetics and other conflicts, but in fact it is like a next part, a complement to Maximum Shame. Both are like a “double feature.” Gallino goes deep into parallel realities, meta-narrative and blurred borders between the pornographic and and the non-pornographic.  Why do we consider one thing pornographic and not another, exactly?  Why some things are visible/presentable and other things are not?  So, Gallino is an strange trip along the cracks, halfway between dream and wakelfulness, porn and no porn, skin and flesh, story and essay.  The plot is hard to explain, but in short I can say it is about a group of people who use pornography —in a very particular sense— for seeing beyond everyday life.  For tearing away the Veil of Isis.

366: One of the weird things about your previous film Maximum Shame is that it uses the iconography of the fetish world, with the Queen dressed in leather bondage gear and the slave harnessed in some bizarre restraints, but there is no actual sex in it.  The closest we come is a foot massage.  Can we expect the same approach to the erotic in Gallino, or will it be more explicitly sexual?
(...)

Read the interview on 366 Weird Movies

Carlos Atanes website: www.carlosatanes.com

366 Weird Movies reviews "PROXIMA", the Last Sci-Fi Movie

"Attached to anything else, the tagline “The Last Science Fiction Movie” might sound hubristic.  But it’s absolutely appropriate to PROXIMA, an apocalyptic love letter to sci-fi and its fans.  Atanes puts his obsession with the genre front and center, and the film is dotted with casual references to Blade Runner, Star Wars, and Jean-Luc Picard.  Perhaps the most telling such reference is “Felix Cadecq,” the name of the Kilgore Trout-like author (Solàs) whose revelations set Tony’s adventure in motion —and a Spanish homonym for “Philip K. Dick,” whose pet themes form the backbone of PROXIMA‘s mind-bending world. But Atanes, as liberally as he may borow from the sci-fi canon, never settles for pure pastiche..." —Read the whole review at 366 Weird Movies

More info about Carlos Atanes at

www.carlosatanes.com

366 Weird Movies reviews my dystopia "FAQ"

"Superficially, the movie unspools as a serious science fiction drama, complete with pretentious poetic narration, but the absurdist touches throughout betray the director’s weird predilections. The idea of the female supremacist tyranny—the Sisterhood of Metacontrol—is bizarre in itself, and Atanes pushes the premise into farce by making the dynamiting of that great phallic symbol, the Eiffel Tower, a major plot event.  The politically incorrect core of the film—its presumption that radical feminists would abolish sex if they ever came to power—is its boldest gambit, but it’s impossible to know exactly how to take this thesis.  It’s hard to know how seriously to take any film where a character makes a serious speech about a higher reality that is watching us, and then, without explanation, put on a red clown nose and gaze reverently skyward.  FAQ’s apparent antifeminist agenda could be seen as a legitimate attack on the Andrea Dworkin strain of radical feminism, or a lampoon of male paranoia about “feminazis,”  or it could be nothing more than a sly reversal of expectations (any society in which absolute power is vested in one of the two sexes would become a dystopia for the other)..." - Read the whole review at 366 Weird Movies

More info about Carlos Atanes at

www.carlosatanes.com

366 Weird Movies reviews my old and loved "CODEX ATANICUS"

"Though born in Paris, Surrealist cinema was conceived in Spain, the love-child of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. If either patriarch had lived to see the mirror succubi, the crab-armed women and the staircase orgies of Codex Atanicus, they’d be proud to claim Carlos Atanes as their offspring. Today, when pure surrealism has been almost abandoned in movies, it’s refreshing to see someone who remains dedicated to probing the mysterious subconscious and carrying on the tradition of Continental Surrealism, despite lack of funding and public indifference. The three films that comprise Codex Atanicus showa a passion for the irrational and a knack for nailing down the way dream concepts follow their own logic, morphing into new entities and images. Like his spiritual grandfather Dalí, Atanes is unabashedly egotistical to the point of self-parody, coining the adjective “Atanic” to describe his own movies; he’s also unafraid to tap into his own erotic impulses for material. The resulting films are intensely personal, and the effects uneven; but when viewing them, it’s impossible to complain that you’ve been exposed to something ordinary and expected..." - Read the whole review at 366 Weird Movies




More info about Carlos Atanes' films
at www.carlosatanes.com