Leones

Deep in the forest a group of five friends wander around like a lion herd. Lost in their word games, they play and seduce each other while going back and forth into adult territory, in a desperate search to avoid their already written story. An Argentine Gerry, Jazmín López’s mysterious and astonishing Borgesian debut may be shot by Gus Van Sant’s Steadicam operator, but it flows with an energy and pacing all of its own.

“A white page, a shape, maybe a point without pre-design, allows me to move eternally into time. Leones is an essay about death, from the point of view of a mortal being, death seen as a beautiful landscape. Youth and its obsessions; death, its beauty and incomprehension. How weak can the human body be in comparison to an intellectual construction? These kids are always in the moment. References to temporality are downplayed, or even denied. They are not only in the moment but immersed in it, anxious and bored, almost beyond temporality. The decay of these flowers and the dirt of their clothes exert pressure on memory. Their extreme presence is more than eternal. End of time: they are not aware of their past. Leones explores the fantastic boundaries of film as a language. The kids are more real than the fiction of the film. Their purpose is an empty pursuit of arriving—nowhere—Animals. The feeling fills the whole space. We have to translate it within ourselves. And only if we stay sensitive towards the world, will we be able to go through it…”—Jazmín López