Virtual Programs FAQ

2019 • dir Oliver Laxe w/Amador Arias, Benedicta Sánchez • 86 min

This hauntingly beautiful film from rising art film director Oliver Laxe is both simple and compellingly enigmatic. Amador (Arias) has just finished serving two years in prison for supposedly setting a fire that almost consumed his community. When he returns home to his mountainside village in northwest Spain, he resumes a serene, if mostly solitary, existence tending cabbages and injured cows with his aging mother, Benedicta (Sánchez). Life seemingly picks up where it left off for the two – following the rhythm of nature despite the suspicious glares of the unforgiving locals. Until, one night, it becomes clear that Amador might be done with fire, but fire is not done with him.

For his third feature, Laxe brings us to his ancestral home of Galicia. Here, in this remote Spanish region, where the grandeur of nature is both beautiful and terrifying, Laxe unfolds a story of the uncontrollable forces of nature on human lives. Stunningly captured on 16mm by cinematographer Mauro Herce, this quietly explosive drama was the winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes last year.

“Fire Will Come is arguably his most fully achieved work. Laxe’s films invite us to dwell on faith and mysticism through a constant blurring of the lines between fiction and documentary, filmmaker and subject, landscape and figure, interior and exterior, and spiritual and material worlds.”
– Bong Joon Ho, Filmmaker (Parasite)

“Strikingly beautiful, meditative, elusive.”
– Wendy Ide, Screen Daily

“Fire Will Come thrives on the power of what is unsaid, the things that go ignored until they grow into a mighty roar.”
– Joe Blessing, The Playlist