BORRUFA
2020 | DCP | 110 minutes
Shot on 16mm film in long, thoughtful takes, Roland Dahwen’s debut feature tells the story of an immigrant family in Oregon whose life is disrupted when it’s revealed that the father has a second family. Reeling from this news, his wife Leonora must choose to either leave her husband, her dying mother, and her son, who has a mysterious illness—or to move on, and let her husband take responsibility for the family he’s destroyed. Haunted by memories, Leonora now struggles between her desires and her responsibilities. With a pace that mimics real life contemplations, Borrufa straddles the line between documentary and narrative, while the generational tragedies of human error slowly creep through the screen. – Portland International Film Festival
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PRESS
“...oblique, withholding, and dreamlike…”
– Portland Monthly
“The cinematography is still and austere, drawing attention to the introspection and loneliness of the characters. The audio is minimal, without any use of non-diegetic music, which further enhances the film’s atmosphere of repressed conflicts. The understated visual style conveys a sense of weighty isolation. Borrufa shows a family whose relationships are rapidly fraying, and yet no one ever raises their voice. The long silences form a language of personal catastrophe.”
– Redefine Magazine
“Shot on 16mm film and resplendent with that medium’s obvious imperfections as well as its warmth and sense of intimate veracity, Roland Dahwen’s mostly-Spanish-language (English-subtitled) feature about an immigrant family in Oregon dealing with the fallout from a major revelation really drew me in. This is the kind of super slow, quiet, contemplative cinema full of very long takes where not much happens in most scenes individually, and yet by the end something seismic has shifted emotionally – like we commonly see in the work of filmmakers like Hirokazu Kore-Eda or Kelly Reichardt, or Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.”
– The Sunbreak
“Borrufa finds its deepest moments in pondering how silence, memory, secrecy, even dreams flow through generations.”
– Willamette Week
“Portlander Roland Dahwen’s first feature tells the story of a family in freefall with little dialogue and less drama. Shot in long, static takes on Super 16 mm film with a cast of non-actors, it’s a beautiful and molasses-slow look at private suffering that worms its way under your skin almost immediately.”
– Portland Monthly
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Supported in part by the Oregon Media Arts Fellowship, funded by the Oregon Arts Commission and the Oregon Community Foundation, in partnership with the Northwest Film Center.
Funded in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.
Additional support from Regional Arts & Culture Council's Innovation Award.
Developed with the support of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's Creative Exchange Lab with lead support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Special post-production support from Academia Internacional de Cinema – Rio de Janeiro (AIC).
