Hot Docs 2025 - The Flamenco Guitar of Yerai Cortés Review

Spanish hip-hop artist C. Tangana, who is no stranger to high-production value music videos and sporadic roles in the odd indie movie (2022’s One Year, One Night immediately comes to mind), jumps in the director’s chair for his feature debut— a documentary about Flamenco guitarist Yerai Cortés, as he embarks on a personal journey of discovery in an attempt to heal old wounds and unravel the truth of his family's history. Immediately, the film launches the audience into an aesthetically pleasing, black-and-white-drenched documentation of a live instrumentation session. All of this is shot on jaw-droppingly gorgeous 16mm, and all the gorgeous staples of the celluloid’s characteristics are on display throughout the film’s projection— this includes, but is not limited to: the popping of audio between reels, pitch-white frames between stitched-together reels (these moments hit especially hard when emotion causes an interviewee to abruptly end a conversation; there’s something slightly chilling about hearing a director sternly say: “stop” from off-screen, just before the camera faces the ground and loses its video. 

These artistic representations infuse within the story of Tangana and Cortés’ documentary, complimenting the various different colour tones provided by the thoughtful cinematography. There’s a sharp sense of mystery that is naturally spawning from the film’s technical elements, as well as how it unpacks the mystery of Cortés’ family. This aggressively compounds itself with the actions of the people involved with the family throughout, leading the piece to be a visual odyssey of sorts; a profound journey of self-discovery and identity in relation to the truth.

From an auditory perspective, the film only soars upwards in this regard. The sound design and the songs/spectacles/live performances that are translated through it are rich and rewarding, crisp and spiraling from beginning to end. Whether the scene involves Cortés beautifully fingering sparkling chords on a nylon guitar while his friend narrates a story, or a community-involved performance of one of Cortés’ very own songs, the musical outings consistently prove themselves to be rewarding and evolving as they progress. However, it’s worthwhile to note that these sporadic vignettes never disrupt the flow of the documentary’s narrative. In fact, they flow with the progression of events rather beautifully; each song is introduced by relevant pieces of exposition that was just discovered by the characters, making the music even more impactful than it initially presents itself to be. The introducing programmer was not wrong: I did feel the music.

Tangana’s restraint as a leading artist is commendable, and instead of forcing narration into the breaks of dialogue to tell context directly to the audience, he opts to tell the stories of these people around beautiful backdrops that reflect the tone of the film at that given moment. This continues to prove that Tangana is taking full advantage of the 16mm celluloid format, and isn’t pulling any punches to provide the most genuine, authentic film possible; a film that is genuine and authentic as the encounter that spawned a friendship between Cortés and Tangana, an encounter that would go on to be responsible for the piece as a whole. It’s a beautiful ode to courage, forgiveness, and love.

Hot Docs 2025 runs until May 3rd. This film has an encore screening on Monday, April 28th at the TIFF Lightbox at 1:45pm. Tickets can be purchased at hotdocs.ca.