Word: arctic
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LOVERS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE Directed by Julio Medem Starring Najwa Mimri, Fele Martinez Fine Line Features...
Lovers of the Arctic Circle, the newest feature from Spanish writer and director Julio Medem, should come with some sort of a warning label. For those of us humanities majors who thought that after passing the QRR we would never have to take another math class again, Medem's romantic saga can come as something of a shock. Who would have thought that all those old logical tools left behind in high school calculus class would come back to haunt us in a movie theater...
Perhaps I'm exaggerating. Lovers of the Arctic Circle...
...seem to be at once constantly contemplating the strange pull of fate that directs their lives and rebelling against it, trying to make room for emotions in the coldly mathematical world that Medem creates. Medem himself as both writer and director shares this passion and intelligence. Lovers of the Arctic Circle could very easily come across as a pretentious intellectual attack on our beliefs about emotion and free will. But Medem doesn't frame his work as an attack so much as he poses it as a question. What if even the most intimate aspects of our lives were nothing...
Lovers of the Arctic Circle is not just any love story, though. Otto (Fele Martinez) and Ana (Najwa Nimri), the story's star-crossed protagonists, are step siblings. They meet by chance as children one day after school and there is an immediate attraction. Within a year, Otto's father has left his mother to marry Anas widowed mother. When he reaches puberty, Otto chooses to live with his father so that he and Ana can become lovers. Needless to say, this is a decision that changes Otto's life forever. His mother is crushed by his desertion...