The Swimmers is an essay pedalling along the slippery edge of a swimming pool: in archival footage, film clips and heartbreaking testimonies, Charlie Lopez investigates, with both humour and lyricism, all that a swimming pool can mean in our lives.
Charlie Lopez plays with the textbook definition of the idea of “pool” in his film, but also with the personal meanings this space has in his emotional universe. The film explores all that lies behind the idea, delving into the mundane (read “sensual”) and the everyday (read “poetic”). Intimacy is something incompatible with a communal space, but Lopez does the impossible: he demonstrates that vulnerability doesn’t stop at the surface of the skin, that sometimes we have to undress beyond our clothes. The pool is a memory of youth, a long-forgotten relative, the pool is eroticism (and) without being pornography. What’s more, the pool is cinema. (Andreea Chiper)
Charlie López (b. 1999, San José) is a twenty-three-year-old Costarican filmmaker and editor. He’s currently graduating from the Véritas Film School in San José, Costa Rica. The Swimmers, a short essay film that adapts artist Ed Ruscha’s photographs of swimming pools, is his first project outside of film school.