Every afternoon, couples meet on the corniche of the town of Larache, the ‘Balcon Atlantico’. Mohamed Chrif Tribak and Hicham Falah’s film uses virtuoso direction and remarkably beautiful and precise 35mm images to thread its way from one moment of encounter to the next, observing the spontaneous ritual of couples who, in turn, bond and tear each other apart. Each of these fragments of intimacy reveals the embryo of a story or a conversation that always ends up eluding us, composing a subtle choral portrait. At once a transgenerational look and a tender portrait of Moroccan youth in the early 2000s, this rare film also reveals itself to be an experimental take on narrative forms, on the power of evocation and elusion, and on the cinematic motif of the encounter.

In a formal counterpoint but embracing a narrative and thematic continuity, Deprisa Deprisa is a hallucinatory fiction about the destiny of Angela and Pablo, whose lives are thrown into turmoil after they meet. Recently restored, Carlos Saura’s film is a little-known classic of the quinqui film genre. Cast with amateurs who were, in essence, recreating their own lives, the film hews closely to the reality of a marginal and delinquent youths in post-francoist Spain. The sense of urgency, of despair almost, conveyed in the title of the film echoes in the overarching and seemingly inescapable contradiction opposing the devastating energy of the protagonists, who are constantly pushed to the brink of the abyss, and the couple’s desire to make every moment last an eternity.