La Voz de Galicia – February 18, 2022 →
The truth is that we had not been to the movies for more than two years, and being in that theater, only the two of us, made me reflect on a hundred things at once. On the one hand, I thought about how movie theaters manage to survive nowadays since their state is not only the pandemic’s fault: our relationship with the movies began to change right before 2020 when digital platforms gave us access to all possible novelties. I thought about how fortunate we were to simply be there, watching a movie in the middle of the week, but I also thought that many of these places will no longer exist in less time than we think, and I wondered about their future.
And then the movie started, drawing us into that magical environment created when the lights go down, in that space without time, without a cell phone, and without rushing…And when the version of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story wrapped us in its mantle of color, music, and movement, the idea that there are spaces that disappear to embrace other realities suddenly appeared to me to be more complex than ever. New York’s West Side disappears to give way to a reality that does not yet exist, and in that process there appear all those fears that make us stop talking to others, that make us look for enemies where there are none. Those fears that push us to hate that which represents difference, that blind us, and that make us forget that in every moment of our history we were a diverse country…And upon leaving the movies, I remembered that the reality in which we live is not so different from the one in that historical musical. The names change, the origins, the places, but what doesn’t change is the way we face change, our way of understanding fear does not change…spaces change, but we don’t change so much.
