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Festival Films
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EL CERCO – THE FENCE screened as a short with:
More about The Fence: In summertime, for hundreds of years, the routine is always the same: tuna, in their reproductive trip toward the Mediterranean Sea, try to elude enormous labyrinths of nets. The tuna that enter this trap become part of the ritual of death, La Almadraba, that the fisherman on the Gibraltar Strait have carried out since Arabic peoples introduced this art form to the European Peninsula countless centuries ago. The Gibraltar Strait on a foggy morning. Bouncing fisherman in boats form a circle. Everything is very calm. The sound is of a gentle sea rubbing the hulls of the wooden boats. A fisherman ties a shrouded rope. The men group in the largest boat and begin to raise a submerged net. The tranquillity of the morning disappears. Nothing happens. Their songs and yells can be heard, but in the sea everything remains the same. Suddenly a fin emerges from the water. It is a tuna–the first tuna. Little by little you can see that the circle begins to fill with fish until the fence changes into a pot boiling with pressure. The tuna crash into one another as the sea becomes smaller and smaller for them. The men can now see their captives more closely. Their shouts and screams make the hysteria grow. The human fence has been built. It is now time to use the human knife against the tuna. Now a rest in action comes. The swarming of the fish continues, but the men abandon their places and move to other boats. We see how they move the net with ease. At first we see their attempts in vain to capture the animals. It doesn't seem like easy work. The fish are able to avoid the harpoon. When they seem trapped, they slip away toward the sea. However, the blood bath has already begun. The first fish is harpooned, then raised into the boat. The hunt has begun. The sound is of screaming–the percussion of the hunted fish. There is a huge shaking of the fish as they crash into one another and against the boat. When the vessels begin to fill up with the large, bloody fish, some of the fisherman throw themselves into the water for the remaining fish that have not yet been caught. It is an unequal fight; the animals are emaciated and paralyzed by their fear. By the end, not a single one remains alive. All will be taken to a trading boat, and ultimately served in Tokyo restaurants WHY YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM Beyond it being a hypnotizing and captivating picture, it will show you an almost never before seen tradition that has been sustained for hundreds of years. It is life. |
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Every year thousands of tuna fish migrate to the Mediterranean Sea. Men chase them in a ritual of blood and death: Three hundred tuna fish are trapped into a ring of nets. Terrified, the animals start jumping and beating their tails on the water surface turning that circle into a huge water curtain. Images of nature abused and overwhelmed. 
