Hymns of youth
It is not unreasonable to come face to face with the six films that make up the filmography of Teddy Williams (five short films plus his first feature film, The Human Surge) as one who sits down to study the different creases in a map that, once unfolded before our eyes, allows us to follow the journey of a strange brotherhood of youths, a kind of aimlessly wandering, smooth-faced community with its own world of various rituals, dialects and myths as fascinating and hypnotic as it is incomprehensible and alien. We could almost find in this borderless mapping a kind of anthropological record that is sent to us from a civilization in which pubescence would seem to be the last possible refuge against the barbarism of the adult world.
Few glimpses over the past few years have offered us such a personal and genuine close-up look as that of Edward Teddy Williams at that semi-beatific state that governs divine forces such as friendship, hedonism, leisure and desire; making an effort we could perhaps talk about Larry Clark, who in the exquisite Ken Park, explored the idea of adolescence as a state of elected people that resist the stakes of adult narrow-minded pettiness. But while Clark fine tunes his films out of a peculiar punk tenderness and a twilight mode that is both captivating and fatalistic, Williams speaks taciturnly from the first-person plural WE (this is not just any data) with a battery of images soaked in mystery, in that everything, unexpectedly, takes on the strength and fragility of an epiphany.
And just as it is not convenient to fall into the clumsiness of approaching a revelation with an eagerness to interpret it, whoever wants to address Williams' films with an analytical state of mind will see unfailingly how his powerful images dissipate away before your eyes. Williams' non-wandering stories, already in France, Sierra Leone, Mar del Plata, Vietnam, Mozambique and the Philippines, break through narrative, linguistic and geographical conventions, functioning more like the domestic chanting of a group of lost children such as those created by J.M. Barrie in Peter Pan, children who fell from their strollers while the nanny was distracted for a split second and who now from their shelter in Neverland struggle to never give in to the cruel passage of time.
Fran Gayo, director of Ourense International Film Festival
Teddy Williams
In a small neighbourhood supermarket in Argentina, a lad does not find what he is looking for. His friends on the street, either. Perhaps, in the vacant lot, in the middle of a hug, he can find it.
Teddy Williams
The accident leads a group of young lads from the high roofs of their neighbourhood, passing through its destruction, to deep within the earth.
Teddy Williams
Climb up there, let's jump, the fields are green and the houses are grey. We are very small and I feel the pores of my skin getting bigger.
Teddy Williams
Searching for a seed, a young man emerges from the underground where he hangs out with his friends. They all embark on a long digestive trip.
Teddy Williams
The very wide angle captures in just a flash the life of Hoa, who is always going places surrounded by friends in constant movement in the streets of Hanoi. Once again, Williams shows his interest in groups and his capacity to film them. Simplicity and remarkable grace to be able to engage them even though they seem to be in another world.