Tierra

Julio Medem doesn't direct his films so much as weave them: images, characters, criss-crossing stories, and recurring motifs intertwine, blur, and transform through time. Tierra begins in the heavens and plummets to Earth, the camera rushing through space down to the red dust of a remote wine-growing region in Spain. Ángel (Carmelo Gómez) attempts to find grounding in his work (he's been hired to fumigate the area, which has been infested by wood lice) but finds his wandering soul torn in two directions. Initially attracted to the lovely, lonely, ethereal Ángela (Emma Suárez), he finds himself drawn against his better nature--in the form of a guardian angel, a phantom double that watches over him like an aggressive but well-meaning conscience--to the earthy, passionate, impulsive Mari (Silke). Medem sets his tale of love and lust amidst the stunning, austere landscape of fiery red hills, a world both primal and alien (dressed in white protective suits, the fumigators look like astronauts on Mars). Like his earlier film The Red Squirrel (which also starred Gómez and Suárez), Medem winds multiple stories together with natural history and philosophical musings until it all melts together in a lovely and unexpected conclusion. Medem crafts an equally dense story in his acclaimed follow-up film, The Lovers of the Arctic Circle, but where that film leapt into the emotional world of tragic melodrama, Tierra transforms "wrong" choices into revealing insights about the beautiful contradictions of human nature. --Sean Axmaker