News & Notes — The Burlington Film Society screens 10,000 KM
10,000 KM opens with a shot that continues unbroken for over 20 minutes as the viewer falls into the easy rhythms, daily rituals, and casual intimacy of Sergi and Alex, a young Spanish couple contemplating having a child together. But the shot is broken soon after Alex reveals she has been accepted into a residency program that will give her the opportunity to spend a year in Los Angeles to focus on her photography. Alex is hungry for the chance to advance her art but Sergi is frustrated at the prospect of delaying their plans to start a family. The next we see of the couple, they are inhabiting spaces thousands of miles apart, their connection held tenuously together through the digital ether.
As the unbroken, fluid physicality of the beginning is split, the film shifts into a series of fractured encounters mediated through technology. Sergi and Alex make use of all the modes of connection at their disposal. Google maps is used to give a tour of the neighborhood. Skype is used for everything from cooking lessons to cybersex. The trials and tribulations of using technology to bridge the gap between bodies will be familiar to any that have experienced a long distance relationship in the modern age. Screens freeze and stutter. Loved ones can be seen and heard, but not held. A text or email goes unanswered and the void becomes easily filled with projections, fears, and jealousy. Distance is both amplified and retracted as digital tools serve to simultaneously collapse and expand the spaces between us.
The filmmaker, Carlos Marques Marcet, and his actors, Natalia Tena (as Alex) and David Verdaguer (as Sergi), create a nuanced and sensitive exploration of the unique challenges created through technology and how these tools impact the nature of our relationships. Does the technology create cracks in the relationship or does it merely call attention to cracks that already exist? Does it allow us greater freedom of mobility and expression or does it tether us to tenuous modes of communication?
The film remains personal and intimate while opening up universal inquires into the disconnect caused by a globalized world held together by digital threads. The actors flesh out characters drawn from small, everyday moments with strong performances attuned to both the tenderness and anxiety of a couple that loves one another, but is discovering that that alone may not be enough. Marques Marcet keeps the film intimate, honest, and specific, and, in doing so, creates a compelling portrait of the modern long distance relationship, one that is aided, challenged, transformed, and eventually consumed by the technology that enables it.
– Meryl O’Connor, 6/21/16
The Burlington Film Society will screen 10,000 KM
on Thursday, June 30, 6:00pm at the Main Street Landing Film House
Presented by Main Street Landing and VTIFF
$8 regular / $5 students / FREE for VTIFF Members
The screening will be followed by a Q&A via Skype with director Carlos Marques-Marcet
