Screened as part of NZIFF 2005

Duck Season 2004

Temporada de patos

Directed by Fernando Eimbcke

“If there's such a thing as a film cruising by on pure charm, that's just what this debut feature does.” — Shane Danielson, Edinburgh International Film Festival

Mexico In Spanish with English subtitles
85 minutes 35mm / B&W

Director

Screenplay

Fernando Eimbcke. With Paula Markovitch, Felipe Cazals

Photography

Alexis Zabé

Editor

Mariana Rodríguez

Music

Alejandro Rosso
,
Liquits

With

Enrique Arreola
,
Diego Cataño
,
Daniel Miranda
,
Danny Perea

Festivals

Cannes (Critics' Week), Toronto 2004; Rotterdam 2005

Elsewhere

Ostensibly uneventful but subtly momentous, Duck Season teases laid-back comedy out of the spectacle of two 14-year-old boys, friends, killing a day together in a housing estate apartment. Fernando Eimbcke’s oblique and tender take on underage swagger and inchoate desire is reminiscent of Raising Victor Vargas and Taika Waititi’s Two Cars, One Night. (And like the latter, it’s elegantly shot in black and white and cut together with spry wit.) As the afternoon progresses, young Flama and Moko fall into a familiar routine of being young and restless together, playing video games, quaffing soda, listening to music and griping about their parents: Moko’s are separating, an unseemly business characterised by their son as a wrangle over the eponymous tacky painting of a flight of ducks. Their routine is disrupted by a take-out delivery man who refuses to leave until he is paid for the pizzas the boys claim arrived seconds too late. Then an older girl from next door commandeers the kitchen to make a cake, proposes sex and drugs – and wreaks sweet havoc. Amongst its many pleasures Duck Season finds stoned rapture in Beethoven – and ends with a perfect post –credits gag that has you leaving the cinema grinning about events yet to befall its thoroughly beguiling characters. — BG