While his name is not yet as recognizable as that of his compatriot Pedro Almodóvar, director Julio Medem has steadily garnered a reputation as one the central figures in Spanish film today—more specifically, in the thriving Basque cinema that is too little seen in the United States. With only four full-length films completed to date (a fifth, Lucia y el sexo is currently being edited), the forty-two-year-old Medem has proved himself a virtuoso stylist whose obsessively explored themes of love, death, nature, and accident have prompted comparisons of his work to that of Borges and Buñuel, David Lynch and Krzysztof Kieslowski. Working from a magical-realist perspective, Medem’s films trace an ongoing fascination with the subconscious, which he treats in a unique juggling of the playful and the tragic. Noted for their meticulous framing and radical juxtapositions of time, place, and perspective, Medem’s films are rife with cinematic imagination and energy and signal the emergence of a major new talent.