Mit geschlossenen Augen

A film like a feverish dream. A vision. The adult Lorenzo Montalbán shuts his eyes and relives the images of his childhood. Mansur Madavi has in a manner of speaking shifted himself into the head of a child and from that perspective he looked at the world of memory of the little Lorenzo. A world in which imagination and experience, fiction and reality, cannot be distinguished. Madavi did not film these beautiful fantasies of youth in the Azerbaijan of his childhood, but in a remote corner of South America, a wild and barren part of Chile. He engenders this desolate landscape with a magic that is reminiscent of the mysterious villages of major Latin-American writers. In this mysterious village with its strange inhabitants, ghost- town emptiness and neglected dogs, the little Lorenzo has his youthful adventures in mysterious tunnels and other secretive places that only kids like Lorenzo manage to find. His school is more or less in the desert and the headmaster Ruben Fernandez is a passionate giver of canings of which Lorenzo is often the victim. Lorenzo shares his life with the weirdos of the imaginary village: Fernando, the boy from the tunnel, Jan Michael, the pigeon hunter and the old madman who eloquently and furiously curses the gods in the desert. The legendary and half derelict village decays and is blown away more and more and can soon only be seen when Lorenzo shuts his eyes again.