“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you,” David Foster Wallace wrote in “Infinite Jest”. Enough said. The characters of this screening may agree or not with that statement, embrace or resist the power of facts. Like in La Veritat et rebutja, Cornelius, which literally means in catalan “The truth rejects you”, which is harsh when it comes from your shrink who happens to be a shrimp. 

The bored kid in Uka-Uka discovers the joys of voyeurism and a new meaning for the biblical parable of the mote and the beam. In A Sweet Day, it’s about being true to oneself in the harshest conditions – the daily and systemic violation of human rights and dignity in your country. But, in Call of The Void, the “vacuum created by the arrival of freedom” (David Bowie, “Up The Hill Backwards”) twists the very question of how much free will you can deal with. And  in Whispers of a Burning Scent, the beauty comes from the puzzling, opaque nature of its protagonist and because his inner truth eludes us. 

Nobody knows anyone else: hard truth indeed.

Foreword by the programme curator: Films about shocking truths, secrets and lies – and why, as Mark Twain famously put it, “truth is stranger than fiction.”