SANDS OF TIME: Ocho and Javi meet in Barcelona
Photography Markus Bidaux
The idea of “what if?” has been explored in the arts in countless guises throughout history — often with a focus on love, romance and fleeting encounters. In part, it’s the subject of Argentinian director Lucio Castro’s award-winning debut feature-length film End of the Century, a beautifully imagined and realised love story between two men who are visiting Barcelona. Ocho, a poet, meets Javi, who has travelled from Berlin to see his family, and the two of them quickly fall into each other’s arms. But their meet-cute is revealed to be a reacquaint-cute as the narrative jumps back 20 years to 1999, when their then heterosexual-acting selves cross paths. End of the Century is deliberately, deliciously ambiguous, open to audience interpretation, but the story came to Lucio in a “very linear way,” he says.
“I didn’t know where it was going to go,” he adds. “A man arrives in a new town and he goes sightseeing, he eats, tries to have sex, not having sex, the next day he sees this guy, they hang out, they have sex and they start talking…