ASTERIÓN

Director's Statement

ASTERIÓN is a poem. It’s a hymn to life and death, to the eternal struggle, to the inner need of change and transformation, but also it’s a poem about the final death of a culture. It’s the story of a double fate, the one of the man and the one of the bull, both doomed to succumb to their own restless natures. The story of ASTERIÓN came to me when I started to connect the famous tale of Borges, The House of Asterión, with the traditional Spanish taxidermia taurina. I was fascinated by the depiction of a sensitive and caring Minotaur facing the aggressively virile masculinity of Theseus. At the end of the tale, Asterión decides not to resist his fatalistic end and he “scarcely defends himself” as an act of non-resistance while facing the true beast. Is this the role of contemporary man towards extreme virility? ASTERIÓN is the second step in my filmography into my own private investigation on masculinity, after Brotherhood. The film poem is a defragmentation of the masculinity of the bull, an animal turned into a restless virile beast, operated by a man, a delicate one, a taxidermist, exploring the virility into pieces, trying to find its source, but being ultimately trapped into his own hidden will, to become like the bull.