Fire Will Come

The title O Que Arde means "what burns," which has been translated as "The Fire will Come" with some change of meaning. Yes, there is a plot but it could be told in a couple of lines and is not important after all. What we watch in this movie is life in a small town in Galicia, in the northwest corner of Spain. The language is mostly Galician with a few Spanish interpolations. Actors are local people, play themselves with their own names and go about their everyday chores apparently oblivious to the camera. The are glimpses of Galicia's reality such as migration of young people to the cities, excessive logging of forests, dedicated firemen with woefully few resources, a villager trying to improve a ruined dwelling into a casa rural (rural house) fit for prospective tourists. The climate is mild and rainy but the summers are dry, facilitating forest fires that are sometimes the result of arson. Both the melancholic winter landscapes and the summer fires are strikingly put on screen.

Director and scriptwriter Oliver Laxe, scriptwriter Santiago Fillol and cinematographer Mauro Herce have joined forces to produce a masterpiece where the boundary between living and acting is blurry and where we find ourselves in the middle of the action for the duration of the movie. An exceptional work that makes us reflect on the nature of cinema.