The Flamenco Guitar of Yerai Cortés

I was expecting to see a film largely about flamenco music and the talents of this guitarist, but instead it was mainly biographical, and I found it quite confusing at times.

The film started off out of focus, and I had no idea who the speaker talking to us at the table was. It turned out to be the director, explaining how he first met Yerai Cortès.

Then we saw interviews with various people, including Cortès, and you were expected to just work out who these people were as they talked. They kept referring to "Tania", without revealing who she was, which was frustrating as she was evidently someone quite significant to them.

Then the girlfriend changed from blonde hair to dark hair at different times during the film, which was also confusing. I thought they were two different people for some time.

The music scenes themselves were fabulous, including the dancing and clapping, and this was what I'd come to see. But these scenes were too thin on the ground.

Finally, at the end in the credits, there was an explanation of who the people were in the various music scenes. If only we'd had this information at the time!

The film could really have done with more captioning and/or intros to explain things to us and give some context. As it was, the disjointedness was just irritating.

I also found the visual references to Elon Musk's satellite launch to be overdone (especially as I can't stand the man), and the modernism of it was quite out of context with the gypsy culture surrounding the music.

Not speaking Spanish and with limited knowledge of Flamenco music and dance I could only grasp some of the themes of this documentary. Nevertheless I enjoyed trying to solve the various puzzles...who the people were, why the name Tania came into the story so often, and what the significance of the various references to gypsies meant. As time passed a story emerged about the relationships among the family members, but I remained a little mystified about how they linked in with the music and the dancing. It was a bit like the film maker had only half-opened a door into their world. I think I could see that Yerai's guitar playing had moved on from traditional flamenco. A slice of life.