El sembrador de estrellas

On his path to blurring the boundaries of fiction and making them more and more hypnotic, the Spanish director puts his visual alchemy into practice far from the estuaries he had enchanted in Coast of Death (2013) and Red Moon Tide (2020)—this time it is a nocturnal Tokyo that works as a canvas in which to build this brief yet fascinating film. Superimposing urban images of constructions and distant lights with ships that move slowly and trains that go across the frame and disappear among sparkles, an imaginary plot is proposed by the voices of a Japanese man and woman. Trough quotes from Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Susan Sontag, Antonio Machado (by whom the titled was inspired) and Victor Hugo, among others, these voices submerge the audience in a plane of unreality that is as lyrical as it is ethereal.