At 46, Alfonso Cuarón (City Of Men, Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban) is still (rightly) considered an impossibly cool, young, stylish filmmaker. Can you imagine how hip his son’s debut feature is? It’s like thinking about infinity, no?
With a curtsey before Chris Marker’s La Jetee – the seminal sci-fi short that became the basis for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys – Cuarón the Younger composes his film entirely from still photographs.
There is a remarkable process behind the montage; the pictures represent a year of shooting everyday occurrences chez Cuarón, which the author arranged into dramatic sequences before composing dialogue to match.
The finished product is this year’s Lost In Translation, a darling doomed romance between a hormonally charged 14-year-old Mexican boy (Diego Catano, the director’s hilarious half-brother) and a visiting American student (‘played’ and voiced by Jonás’ girlfriend Eireann Harper).
Inventive and touching, Año Uña will put a small skip in your step for days, even if it is chastening to think that its author is only 26. Watch him go.