Selegna Sol

After several years of absence, Gibran returns to Los Angeles with the goal of saving up to purchase land in Tecate, the village where he was born in Mexico. As he organizes his departure, he rediscovers the emotional and historical ties that bind him to the United States.

Paradoxical or self-evident. Gibran wants to leave Los Angeles just as he is officially being given American citizenship. At last, leave a country that finally wants you. This is what preoccupies him and his friends, all from Mexico and living in LA. In this sprawling city, the filmmaker seems to set a tight focus on this group. So, a film up close, but multifaceted, fragmentary, with just as many stories as the city has dimensions – also a city with several names: Selegna Sol is the name used by Gibran and his companions. A name for the city inside out, choices against the grain for a splintered film, where each fragment is potentially a new direction. A chronicle at the heart of a community, with no real departure or arrival point, but something begins in between. Here, the paths are fantasised: if you follow the lines of a hand, they divide into branches when they end, the future is open, wide, uncertain. You need to narrow it down, find your way, tame the solitude stemming from the multitude. With its subdued images and throbbing rhythm, the film finds a beat out of step with the American myth, local filmmaking. The filmmaker, like her protagonists, looks and falls in love with America: long tracking shots on the streets or from tall buildings. Tracking shots of suburban houses, nothing like the postcard views. A mechanical speech about patriotic naturalisation inviting you to choose America, the country who has chosen you after selection, resonates on the houses. Choose the America that Gibran wants to leave. Will he do it? No matter. Selegna Sol resembles a floating teen movie with a delicate centre of gravity, made of premonitory dreams and contradictory attachments. How to leave a place that attaches you perhaps as much as you feel attached to it?

Clémence Arrivé Guezengar