So what you're saying is you have a smattering (or maybe more than a smattering) of Portuguese and Italian and not of Catalan, so far? Is your wife Spanish-speaking?

August Days is not only a visual extravaganza but an auditory one. The comparison with Lisandro Alonso's powerful Los Muuertos doesn't seem to me very enlightening, "extended river exploration sequence" notwithstanding. They have about as much in common as Catalan and Italian. Acquarello has a slight proclivity for the far-fetched link. I can see why you'd admire that site but I'm glad you don't emulate Acquarello's highfallutin "Strictly Film School" style, which sails high and often sinks, Icarus-like, into the muddy sea of its own pretentions.
a visually sublime, but soporific and tediously unoriginal effect
Acquarello does love to multiply those adjectives and adverbs. You have to wonder how something can be simultaneously sublime and tediously unoriginal. (Is there a category of stimulatingly unoriginal, I wonder?) It does go on and on, Recha's film, and never gets anywhere though. You might like it, sure. Acquarello ought to have mentioned the sound. And I guess the Catalan language adds to the richness of that. Here's what I wrote in my coverage of the NYFF 2006:
In August Days/Dies d'agost Marc Recha has given us a sun-saturated Catalan documentary-style road movie that’s mostly a meandering improvised meditation on brotherhood and reclaiming the dead. The beautiful sometimes large-scale, richly atmospheric 35 mm. landscape images, nice soundtrack and Catalan-language narration are enchanting as a mood piece, if one is content with a trajectory that hasn’t much momentum and doesn’t lead anywhere in particular.
You probably are. For much of the time I was.