The first of Six Close Encounters took place today in the Grand Hall. Spanish filmmaker Luis Miñarro presented a movie near to his heart, Orson Welles’s classic noir film Touch of Evil. “At first I thought of Dreyer’s Ordet, but this year marks the hundredth anniversary of Welles’s birth, so I picked one of his films,” said Miñarro, the producer of The Mosquito Net and winner of the Crystal Globe at the 2010 KVIFF.
Miñarro first saw the film, a drama about a conflict between a Mexican policeman and his American colleague, when he was about fourteen years old in a theatre in Barcelona, in Spanish and most likely in a version other than Welles’s final cut. Even in this form, the film showed him unforgettably that what seems to be good also has another side to it. “I suddenly realized that even the police can be corrupt, that the world is in some ways terrible, and that I was naive,” Miñarro recalls.
