By STEVE MARTINDALE
FOR SALT SPRING FILM FESTIVAL SOCIETY
Despite previewing over 300 films this year, the Salt Spring Film Festival’s screening committee has selected just one drama to include in this season’s “Best of the Fests” series at ArtSpring: the award-winning Spanish film 20,000 Species of Bees.
We were in search of the kind of beautifully heartfelt film that has proven popular with audiences here on Salt Spring, such as last year’s visually sumptuous and beloved Moroccan weeper The Blue Caftan, or the romantic depiction of dangerously repressed desire in And Then We Danced from the former Soviet country of Georgia, which we screened in 2020 to great acclaim.
Unfortunately many of the narrative films we previewed at other festivals over the past year were disappointingly mediocre, and the best of the bunch were often well executed but coldly precise, failing to elicit any meaningful emotional response.
And then we had the opportunity to see 20,000 Species of Bees, which sounded as though it might be a nature documentary about apian diversity, but which turned out to be one of the most engaging and memorable films of the year.
A sculptor grappling with her artistic identity gradually becomes aware that her youngest child is struggling with gender identity, and over the course of an otherwise idyllic summer vacation in the Basque countryside, her initial obliviousness slowly shifts to maternal concern, followed by briefly intense moments of alarm, as she and her family try to make sense of why their previously cheerful eight-year-old is becoming increasingly reactive, sullen and withdrawn.
With novelistic attention to detail and decidedly non-Hollywood restraint, a layered series of small, intimately observed moments over the course of this understated film eventually culminates in a crescendo of emotion that catches viewers off-guard with its depth and intensity.
Basque filmmaker and screenwriter Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s surprisingly assured début feature has won multiple audience awards at festivals around the world. Leading an ensemble of astonishingly believable performers, newcomer Sofía Otero — who is in almost every scene of the film — became the youngest-ever winner of the prestigious Berlinale Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival.
The late, great Maya Angelou famously said that “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” The same can be said of cinema, which has the power to affect viewers on a profoundly emotional level that few other art forms can achieve, leaving us wiser and more empathetic for having briefly immersed ourselves in the lives of others.
As is true of the best and most evocative dramas, you may find that years from now, long after the somewhat cryptic title and the specifics of the deceptively simple plot have faded from memory, you will still remember how this lovely, heart-wrenching and thoroughly humanistic film made you feel.
Co-presented by DAISSI and Haiti Beekeepers Society, tickets to 20,000 Species of Bees are $13 each and are available via the ArtSpring box office and online. For more information, visit saltspringfilmfestival.com.