<3, María Antón Cabot, Spain, 2018, 62 '
*Presentation: María Antón Cabot
"<3 is an approach to the simple things, the ones that we need most, to those that are abstract, as love and desire. Youngsters are asked, in a direct and unprejudiced way, about how they build desire, and if they still think about love.
The first impulse to record this film was Pasolini. When we first watched Comizi d'amore we felt the need to find that freshness to search for and talk about certain topics that seem to no longer matter, or are not current. Many times the prevailing cynicism, constant fear spred by media and endemic pessimism makes us forget to talk about the things that matter and make us forget about the things that make us grow and ask ourselves what we are, and how we live. It's those interviews that inspired us and also the ones we watched, and still remember, in the television we grew up with, like Jesús Vázquez in "Hablando se understand la basca". Perhaps, the discourse was not as well mastered in that programme as it is today, but it transpired simplicity, freedom and closeness, and young people had a voice.
We found the perfect place to rethink our ways of feeling in the El Retiro park in Madrid. An emblematic place known by all, in which a certain historical air mixes with the present, and where we can find a plurality of profiles: children, young people, seniors, families, athletes, tourists, people who walk, people who cross it, people who work there, and among all of them, lovers.
Our commitment was to register the concrete and the everyday, without imposing labels or previous explanations. It is the gesture, the look, the encounter, the generated words, the stumble, the kisses, which allows us to speak with fidelity of what happens. Interviews intersect with the loved ones. We have approached different people trying to deepen and reflect on the new uses of love and desire, we accompany them trying to discover what they feel or what they are looking for.
In our days, there are many who accuse the new generations of a turn towards exacerbated egocentrism (the so-called selfies that would populate social networks, the generation of the "I"), to have an unlimited access to sexual and pornographic contents, to make use of a communication between sexes of which no generation in history had enjoyed before. But, have we changed so much? Are teenagers creating a new way of feeling? "
<3 is an approach to the simple things, the ones that we need most, to those that are abstract, as love and desire. Youngsters are asked, in a direct and unprej