For our first screening of 2026, Acropolis is thrilled to welcome director Oliver Laxe, who will be in person for an extended introduction to tonight's screening beginning at 7:30pm.
With Fire Will Come, Oliver Laxe, director of this year's highly acclaimed Sirāt, brings us to his ancestral home of Galicia. Here, in this remote Spanish region, where the grandeur of nature is both beautiful and terrifying, Laxe unfolds a story of the uncontrollable forces of nature on human lives.
After serving two years in prison for arson, Amador (Amador Arias), returns to his mountainside village in north-west Spain, where he resumes a serene, if mostly solitary, existence tending cabbages and injured cows with his ageing mother, Benedicta (Benedicta Sánchez). Life resumes for the two following the rhythm of nature despite the suspicious glares of the unforgiving locals—until one night a devastating fire ignites that threatens to engulf the entire region. Stunningly captured on 16mm by DP Mauro Herce, this quietly explosive drama was the winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
TRT: 85
In person: Oliver Laxe
"Strkingly beautiful, meditative, elusive." —Wendy Ide, Screen Daily
"At only 80 minutes and change, Fire Will Come is slim, distilled and as sharp as a shiv to the gut." —K. Austin Collins, Rolling Stone
"You know exactly what climax is coming in Oliver Laxe's rustically beautiful rural parable, but its dreamy, mesmeric power lies in the waiting." —Guy Lodge, Variety
"A pithy and devastating masterstroke from an auteur astute in his calibration of subdued emotional impact. Its discourse on forgiveness simmers in one's mind inextinguishably." —Carlos Aguilar, The Los Angeles Times
"Arguably Laxe’s most fully achieved work. Invites us to dwell on faith and mysticism through a constant blurring of the lines between fiction and documentary, filmmaker and subject, landscape and figure, interior and exterior, and spiritual and material worlds." —Bong Joon Ho, director of Parasite
(Available to download after screening date)