Parasceve: Portrait of an Easter Week
Few love letters have been given by Spanish cinema as heartfelt as the piece that concerns us. An ode of infinite affection to the Easter festivities, to Holy Week, to the living God, to the dead God, to the resurrected God... to the rite, to the folklore, to the people. From Ash Wednesday to Palm Sunday, and then to Easter Sunday, all in the city of Seville. This is how this postcard is presented to us.
Young director with many shots given (five feature films, multiple music videos and series, and a good catalog of local awards), Hilario Abad has spent the last ten years of his life (2012-2021) living the Holy Week with his camera to, as if it were a kind of prayer, create a living picture of what happens every year in the city of Seville: parasceve. Preparation.
Preparation in the stores. Preparation in workshops, factories, homes and on the street. Parasceve is a quasi-impressionistic portrait of manners, which conveys the emotion of the portrayed and the portrayed, creating something intangible but powerful. He does not enter into arguments, debates or discussions. He only extends a hand and invites us to join him in this experience.
With care, tact, detail and preciousness, we get this documentary at street level, made with taste and good rhythm, dynamic but contemplative, which plays its cards with skill when using silences, noises and music, enhancing the essence of the Easter celebrations for both sight and sound. It avoids narration and voice-over. offSometimes the viewing is peppered, spiced up, with the occasional commentary from the audience or media rebroadcast. This makes the piece a risky work, but one that nevertheless knows how to penetrate the audience and create its own rhythm, awakening and maturing true emotions in the spectator, as we see the labels of the days pass before our eyes in chronological order.
For all this, Hilario has had the help of Francisco Javier Torres Simón, a local composer with whom he has built a project from a cardboard model in his house -literally- to the feature film that reaches theaters throughout Spain. A great contribution for the beginning of Lent.
