Theaters playing LOVERS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE 7/30/99
Theaters subject to change -- please check local listings for showtimes.

Lovers of the Arctic Circle tells the story of a secret, passionate love affair that spans 17 years and takes its participants to the ends of the earth. Placing the concept of romantic destiny at center stage, Spanish writer/director Julio Medem unites the film's lovers in an elegantly constructed plot of interlocking coincidences, chances and parallels. The film finds the award-winning Medem at peak form, and introduces to America one of Europe's most compelling and original young filmmakers. Balancing emotional intensity with cinematic rigor, Julio Medem has created that rare film that engages the heart and excites the intellect.

Lovers of the Arctic Circle unfolds in alternating chapters narrated by its two main characters, Ana (Najwa Nimri) and Otto (Fele Martínez). Ana and Otto first meet as eight year old schoolchildren, at a critical moment when both are experiencing traumatic changes in their families. Fate soon brings them together again, when Ana's mother, Olga (Maru Valdivielso), and Otto's father, Alvaro (Nancho Novo), fall in love. For the next 17 years, Ana and Otto will be at the center of each other's universe.

Lovers of the Arctic Circle was produced by Fernando Bovaira and Enrique López Lavigne, and executive produced by Txarli Llorente and Fernando de Garcillán. Gonzalo F. Berridi was the director of photography, Iván Aledo the editor. Alberto Iglesias composed the film's music. The film shot for nine weeks on location in Spain and Finland. Fine Line Features is releasing Lovers of the Arctic Circle in the U.S.

Lovers of the Arctic Circle is the fourth feature directed by Julio Medem, whose previous films, Cows (Vacas), The Red Squirrel (La Ardilla Roja) and Earth (Tierra) have been honored at festivals including the Cannes Film Festival, the Montreal World Film Festival and the Tokyo International Film Festival. For his third film, Earth, Medem scripted a diary for the main character; with Lovers of the Arctic Circle, he decided to employ first person narration throughout. "My idea was to write a love story narrated by each of its protagonists, from their subjectivity and partiality, and always emotionally moved by each others' lives. That is to say, for each person the only important thing is what one feels for the other."

Ana and Otto meet at the age of eight, at a moment of upheaval in both their lives. Each has taken off running into the woods near their school. Ana has just learned of her father's death, and with a child's instinctive logic, is literally attempting to run away from tragedy, to turn back the clock. Otto is a few feet behind her, chasing an errant soccer ball. His parents are about to separate, but Otto disputes his father's explanation that their love has died.

When Ana falls on the ground and turns to look at Otto, each sees a kind of cosmic response to their emotional distress. "Otto's reaction to his father having fallen out of love with his mother is to embark on a search for eternal love," explains Medem. "Otto is convinced that he met Ana thanks to a kind twist of fate, by which he should allow himself to be guided."

Ana decides that the spirit of her dead father has taken up residence inside Otto. Noting her firm belief in coincidence, Medem says, "Ana therefore proves that destiny, according to the secret map of coincidences, brings her a gift for eternity - Otto."

Ana and Otto's beliefs about fate form a kind of protective bubble for the lovers, creating a secret place that holds them safe from the rest of the world and its sufferings. "After they meet, they begin to live in an imaginary world - although they do so for completely different reasons - where they give absolute priority to each other," remarks Medem.

Starting at the subtlest levels and working his way out, Medem constructs a deliciously intricate network of coincidences, parallels and intersections that encompass and shape the lovers' lives. The initial coincidences that cause their lives to intersect are small, apparently unremarkable, beginning with their running into the woods, on the same day, in the same direction. A paper airplane, one of many launched by Otto from the boys' restroom at school, sparks a romance between Ana's mother Olga (Maru Valdivielso) and Otto's father Alvaro (Nancho Novo) that will result in Ana and Otto becoming de facto siblings. It is illustrative of the film's attention to detail that those airplanes express Otto's particular obsessions with flight and eternal love.

Ana's extremely imaginative nature and keen appreciation of coincidence pushes their relationship to its next stage. When they are teenagers, Otto tells Ana a story about how he got his name from a German pilot, a story that, for Ana (and hence, for Otto), changes everything. Says Medem, "From that moment Ana will finally accept her father's death, and will discover that Otto is in love with her." With characteristic curiosity and impulsiveness, Ana decides that she, too, wants to be in love. One night, while looking with Otto at a map of the Arctic Circle, Ana initiates their first kiss.

The cinematic language surrounding the new lovers is classically romantic. Ana and Otto first sleep together on a stormy night, the wind whipping through the trees. They steal through windows into one another's bedrooms, conducting their affair in secret. There is a sly humor, too, in the couple's sexual awakening, as in the scene where they spy on their parents making love, or Otto's bedazzled, but thoroughly tangible, reaction to Ana's beauty. Overall, there is more teasing and joking than starry-eyed adoration.

The sudden death of Otto's mother (Beate Jensen) abruptly ends the idyllic phase of Ana and Otto's romance. As a child, Otto had vowed to his mother that he would love her forever, and never leave her as his father did; but in moving from his mother's house to his father's, Otto did, in effect, leave her for Ana, betraying his vow. Now she is dead, of a broken heart. Otto, who, as Medem notes, "possesses an inner world which determines his ethics, his conduct and sense of reality," is tormented by feelings of guilt and leaves Ana and the family for an uncertain future. The family completely splinters when Olga leaves Alvaro for a Finnish television producer named Alvaro Midelman (Jaroslaw Bielski).

Fate now seems to conspire to keep Ana and Otto separated. While Otto sits unnoticed a few feet away, Ana cadges a cigarette from Javier (Pep Munné), Otto's former schoolteacher. Ever on the lookout for coincidences, Ana follows this one into a relationship with Javier. As Medem notes, "Ana believes in coincidence so profoundly that she is prepared to push things in order to provoke what she thinks destiny has in store for her."

Never is that tendency more evident than when Ana learns that her stepfather's father owns a cottage on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Now the map of coincidences becomes even more compelling, as Ana learns that Midelman's father, Otto (Joost Siedhoff), is German and a former pilot - just like the man in her lover's adolescent story. "With time, upon meeting an old German man, Ana continues Otto's story at her leisure, closing a circle that will put them on the return path to their reunion," says Medem. "That will be the story that unites them."

Given its narrative complexity and thematic scope, a detailed blueprint was essential in creating Lovers of the Arctic Circle. "The film was very structured from the script stage and it kept that structure throughout the editing process," Medem confirms.

He organized the story into discrete chapters that follow their own intrinsic logic. The majority are called either 'Otto' or 'Ana' to indicate their separate points-of-view. The final three sections belong to both Otto and Ana, and are no longer strictly first person narrative. Thus, Medem gave these chapters different titles. "'The Arctic Circle' is the place where they finally unite. 'Ana's Eyes' and 'Otto in Ana's Eyes' is another way of saying Ana and Otto at the climactic moment."

In some instances, the script revealed symmetries that Medem had been unaware of as he was writing. In fact, he notes that one of the film's major motifs came about by chance. "During Ana and Otto's first kiss, I had to put something in the geography book. It was sort of random that I picked the Arctic Circle. It wasn't until later that I realized how well it worked."

He continues, "This might be lost in the English translation, but on the envelope Ana sends from Finland the return address reads 'Fin-Landia,' not Finlandia. By separating the word 'fin-landia,' it sort of becomes 'end land,' a play on words."

An engaging sense of wordplay runs throughout the film, from the winking pun on Otto's name and avocation - Otto-the-pilot - to the fact Ana and Otto both have palindromic names. The root of palindrome is the Greek palindromas, meaning "recurring," and the film is rich with recurring images: of looming buses and nose-diving planes; of empty gas gauges and, of course, circles. The circles are both visible and theoretical: the first close up of Ana's eye, the portion of the schoolyard gate that frames Otto's romantic paper airplanes, the window through which Otto views his mother's coffin, the midnight sun of the Arctic Circle; Otto and Ana's names, which begin as they end, suggest circles, as does the self-contained world their love makes for them. History, too, is a repeating cycle: the German pilot Otto, stranded in a tree, is a precursor to Otto the lover, stuck in a tree on his way to reunite with Ana.

To cast the film, Medem had to find six actors to play two people at different points in their lives. With Ana, though, he had a head start. "The character of Ana was written for Najwa Nimri. I had first seen her in Daniel Calparoso's Salto al vacio and was very impressed with her," the director remarks. "I even thought of using her for the adolescent Ana as well."

Finding the right Otto proved a bit more difficult. "I looked at several well-known actors in Spain before I found Fele Martínez. Once the adults had been cast then I worked backwards and started casting the adolescents and the children."

Medem's son Peru plays the young Otto, a development his father hadn't foreseen. "I saw 5,000 children over six months looking for the young Otto and Ana!" Medem remembers. "But as I started to write the character of Otto I found it very useful to have my son there and then casting him in the role started to kick in as an idea, a beautiful idea."

Still, it was decision he approached cautiously. "I was afraid because of the complexity of the film business and the fame, but also because I didn't want Peru to make emotional connections between the divorce of the characters and the separation between his mother and me. So I didn't tell him about all of the family situations in the film that he could relate to his own family situation."

As with the screenplay, careful consideration was given to the film's mise-en-scene. Medem opted for understatement, with no element of the film calling undue attention to itself. Fluid editing, such as those instances when Otto and Ana change from schoolchildren to adolescents almost without our noticing, enhances the fable-like quality of their story (a quality imputed, too, by the two narratives). Adding to the film's air of mystery are its quietly stunning visuals, its white expanses and clear blue skies.

The controlled, sophisticated structure and atmosphere of Lovers of the Arctic Circle -- its cinematic coolness, in a sense - works in perfect opposition to its romantic intensity. As Medem puts it, "The film establishes a relation in which the cold contains the heat, in the way that the more the outside cools, more heat will be able to be held inside. The dialogue structure, the staging, especially moderate, austere and contained, and the photography - contrasting and cold - work to preserve the secret intimacy of these two lovers. In this way, from the beginning of their secret, Ana and Otto are building a capsule of protection that isolates them from their environment, including those as close as their own parents. No one apart from them will ever know of their passion."

Otto sees his life as one uncompleted circle, while Ana describes her life as a train of coincidences. In a sense, their two philosophies complement the emotional and cerebral aspects, respectively, of Lovers of the Arctic Circle. For Otto, who was devastated as a child by the breakup of his parents, constancy is of primary importance, and love should not run out like gasoline. Otto leads with his heart; as Ana notes, "no one has a heart like Otto's."

Ana, on the other hand, leads with her imagination, embracing coincidence wherever she finds it. "Her enormous capacity for invention is probably due to the radical way in which she defends herself in the face of suffering," Medem believes. "There is something intensely primitive about her way of fleeing from tragedy; it engenders, although she is probably not conscious of it, an imaginary world so powerful that it rises to the level of her desires. It is a world in which she can live indefinitely."

And perhaps she does. At the unsettling conclusion of Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Ana will try and outrun fate one more time. But if theirs is a tragic romance, it is redeemed by the final image of Otto in Ana's eyes.

Two lovers, about to meet at the edge of the Arctic Circle, Ana (Najwa Nimri) and Otto (Fele Martínez) recount the events that led them there ...

Ana and Otto are eight years old when they first encounter each other running in the woods near their school. Ana's father has just died in a car crash, and Otto's parents are separating. As they stare at each other, Ana wonders if her father's spirit has entered the body of this young boy, while Otto is simply spellbound by this girl. From this moment on, their lives are inextricably bound.

Otto is a dreamy boy who loves airplanes and all things to do with aviation. One day he sends a squad of paper airplanes flying onto the schoolyard, which results in a romance between his father Alvaro (Nancho Novo) and Ana's mother, Olga (Maru Valdivielso). Alvaro and Olga move in together, imposing a familial state on their two children.

Otto lives with his mother, Ula (Beate Jensen), but he visits his father each weekend. Otto silently adores Ana, but is unable to give expression to that love. Only when they are teenagers does Ana abandon the idea of Otto as a proxy for her father. When Otto tells a story about how he came to be named after a German pilot with whom his grandfather struck up a brief friendship during the Spanish Civil War, Ana is suddenly able to see him as a person with his own history. She discovers that Otto is in love with her, and decides that she wants to fall in love with him, too. One night, as they pore over a map of the Arctic Circle, the land of the midnight sun and white nights, she leans over and kisses him.

The relationship quickly intensifies and, in order to be closer to Ana, Otto leaves his mother's house to live with his father full-time. The lovers pretend to be indifferent, if not hostile, to each other in front of their parents, but they soon consummate their relationship, sleeping together on the sly. However, in leaving his mother's house, Otto has effectively broken the vow he made to her as a child, that he would love her forever and never desert her as his father did. One day, he goes to visit her and finds her in the kitchen, dead of a broken heart. Devastated and guilt-stricken, Otto runs away from his father's house, leaving no note or explanation.

Ana is thus left alone, her life suddenly dull and joyless. As an adult, she is uncertain about what direction her life should take. When by chance she meets Javier (Pep Munné), Otto's former schoolteacher, Ana embraces the coincidence and ends up moving in with him and becoming a schoolteacher herself. Olga, meanwhile, has left Alvaro for a Finnish television producer (Jaroslaw Bielski), who is also named Alvaro.

With Ana no longer at the center of his life, Otto sets out to construct an existence for himself. He fulfills his lifelong dream when he gets a job as a pilot for a courier company flying between Spain and Finland. Ana breaks up with Javier and her need to get out of town leads her to Finland, where she visits her new stepfather's father, whose name turns out to be Otto and who lends Ana his cottage in Lapland, on the Arctic Circle. Talking with this new Otto, Ana begins to suspect that he is the same German pilot for whom her beloved Otto was named. Her belief confirmed, Ana writes to her Otto about this final, astounding coincidence. In the land of the midnight sun, the circle of Ana and Otto's entwined lives will finally begin to close.

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