Julio Medem's room in Rome

UPDATE 24.10.2010 Just posted my review of the movie here.

UPDATE 9.9.2010 Amazon.co.uk lists room in rome DVD with a release date of Oct. 18, at a reasonable price of 11.99. Pre-order now before they change their mind.
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I’ve started reading a little book about my favourite film maker, Julio Medem, which just appeared this spring (by the gloriously basque-named author Zigor Etxebeste Gómez, Ediciones Cátedra 2010). I found out that he has a new film out in Spain, called Habitación en Roma (Room in Rome), which had its premiere at the Málaga Film Festival in April, and full release in May.

I’ve checked the IMDB entry and found out that there isn’t a release date for the UK (or any other country) at this point. Reading what Etxebeste writes about the new film, however, I am getting extremely worried that it may not get a UK release at all. It appears that it is a love story between two women who are undressed most of the time, and the DP uses lots of macro lenses to show the physical geography of each woman as the other would see it from very close up. Now something is telling me that the UK censors will not be looking very kindly at this approach. (Yes, I know that the C in BBFC stands for classification these days, but it still amounts to censorship, as it stops people from getting to see the films.)

So, I guess I’ll have to chase around Barcelona when I get there in October for some little backyard cinema that still shows films months after their release. Watch out for the resounding silence with which the British press will meet this film, even if it gets a UK release. Medem’s previous film, Caótica Ana, didn’t get released here (in that case it’s more likely due to the political aspects of the movie) and I don’t think it ever got mentioned anywhere, which is good for me, in a way, because my blog entry about the film emerges as the highest ranking google result in English.

Meanwhile, I looked on YouTube and found a completely marvellous “musical trailer” which is essentially a music video for the wonderful song “Loving Strangers” by Madrid folk singer song-writer Russian Red (aka Lourdes Hernández) furnished with scenes from the movie:



There is also a proper trailer, but that one is really too hot to handle for the English-speaking parts of the world.

PS One intriguing detail that I didn’t know about Medem is that his paternal grandfather, and thus the palindromic name which inspired the structures of some of his movies, came from a German family. The family history of the Medems, going back to Caspar von Medem (* 1560) is here. Note the frequency of the palindromic names Otto and Ana, which Medem used in Los amantes del circulo polar.