Palme d’Or Winner Lluís Miñarro Talks ‘Emergency Exit,’ ‘70s Barcelona, Naomi Kawase and How He Came to Produce ‘Uncle Boonmee’

Few films at this year’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival will play with so many ideas, or are steeped with so many strands of modern culture, than “Emergency Exit,” the third fiction feature as a director of Lluís Miñarro, a producer of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or winner.

Also written by Miñarro, “Emergency Exit” features the final screen performance of Almodóvar star Marisa Paredes.

Set on the Canary Island of Tenerife, “Emergency Exit” weighs in as a homage to ‘70s cinema, its Barcelona counter-culture and the films worshipped in that decade that were the makings of Miñarro as a filmmaker.

The plot comes across as a road movie version of Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel.” 14 disparate characters – an actress, her manager, a closeted priest, two divas, an archeologist, a housewife and an evangelist, among others – board a coach which once in motion they seem unable to leave.