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Main Articles

FAIRY TALES FOR THE CYNICS: ADOLFO ARRIETA’S BELLE DORMANT

By José Sarmiento-Hinojosa

For someone who is not aware of Ado Arrieta’s career, which spans over 50 years and has produced some outstanding avant-garde films such as The Adventures of Sylvia Couski (which is basically a mixture of Mekas’ Walden and Smith’s Flaming Creatures), the ease of manner with which he handles this adaptation of the tale of Sleeping Beauty can be confused with a naive exercise on story-telling, an innocuous practice on futility of a story which could be handled on its many political undertones, breaking apart its narratives to approach the social conflicts that underline his film.

2018.02.21

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2018: PREMIERES SOLITUDES AND DIE TOMORROW

By Aldo Padilla

During the last Rotterdam film fest, a certain tendency of “cruelty cinema” located in schools could be found. Five films seen in the Dutch festival are about school adolescents ending their stories in a tragic way, due to different abuses of classmates, professors or social media, all represented as a true hell on earth. Even if part of this may be true, or that this problems are not a particular thing of the present, one struggles to understand the pattern of punishment with the adolescents in those films, either for lack of integration, sexual early awakening, and overall, a common factor in gender violence, since it was women who suffered the greatest abuse.

2018.02.21

Críticas

PANORAMA: SOBRE BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99

Por Renato León

Vince Vaughn tiene una larga carrera como actor de comedias, pero bajo la dirección de Zahler logra convertirse en un tipo rudo e introspectivo, como los viejos héroes del cine americano. A ello contribuye una atmósfera marcada por tonos azulados y fríos, tan grave como la mirada fija de Bradley o el tatuaje en forma de cruz que tiene en la cabeza (lo que podría remitir a una filiación «nacionalista», pero que nunca queda clara).

2018.02.20

Artículos

SACRAMENTO EN EL OJO DE LADY BIRD

Por Mónica Delgado

Tengo la impresión de que entre los jóvenes estadounidenses la obra de Joan Didion se ha puesto de moda. O en todo caso, algunos trabajos de esta escritora de Sacramento tienen vigencia. Reediciones y hasta un documental de corte convencional (El centro cederá, dirigido por su sobrino Griffin Dunne) se puede ver en Netflix, para indagar un poco más en la obra de esta ensayista y narradora de no ficción.

2018.02.20

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2018: PREMIERES SOLITUDES Y DIE TOMORROW

Por Aldo Padilla

Esta vez nos detenemos en dos trabajos presentados en la sección Forum de la Berlinale 2018: Premieres Solitudes de Claire Simon y la tailandesa Die tomorrow de Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit.

2018.02.20

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2018: BIXA TRAVESTY BY CLAUDIA PRISCILLA Y KIKO GOIFMAN

By Aldo Padilla

Transsexualism can be seen as a weapon of protest, not against nature but against a society that imposes the basic rules of what a man and a woman are supposed to be. The idea of transsexualism is not to regret being born under certain gender, but to decide on what you want to do with your body, with your image against the world. Transsexualism is one of the most committed political acts, to decide against conventional rules and manifest a position in a radical way.

2018.02.20

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2018: BIXA TRAVESTY DE CLAUDIA PRISCILLA Y KIKO GOIFMAN

Por Aldo Padilla

Bixa travesty es la gran sorpresa del festival, en medio de películas que parecen enfocarse en la ambigüedad humana y la falta de definición, el film se juega claramente por un discurso, sin maniqueísmos, sin concesiones y con rabiosos versos que muestran una gran fortaleza en medio de un Brasil que pasa por uno de sus momentos más complejos en los últimos años, donde el conservadurismo y la corrupción parecen arrasar con todo.

2018.02.19

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2018: DOVLATOV BY ALEKSEI GERMAN JR.

By Aldo Padilla

Being a non-recognized artist in one’s time is something that has been dragged as a curse for the most part of many transgressive creators in their times. Many circumstances are fruit of a political or repressive context, but most of the time this is related to the incomprehension of editors, critics and public in general. Sergei Dovlatov is one of those figures that only in the exterior could be really appreciated in the nineties. This and his early death mythicized even more his image.

2018.02.19

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2018: CLASSICAL PERIOD, INTERCHANGE AND WILD RELATIVES

By Aldo Padilla

The characters in the films of Ted Fendt are of a surprising simplicity. The simplification he realized in Short Stay of the classic lost character without a path, defined in the streets of Philadelphia, seems to be transposed in his new film Classical Period, where the characters are defined by how much do they know, how many authors can they quote and how many references can they give on every possible topic. Although everything seems like an empty discourse, which could easily be part of a paper or a thesis, since it says nothing in between this long, verbose dialogue that doesn’t seem to end.

2018.02.19

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2018: ARCHIVES OF THE MIND’S EYE

By Pamela Cohn

The queuing system at a festival this huge is long and arduous. An investment of an hour or more waiting in line is sometimes necessary. I was one of the first in the pass holder line (no ticket) to see Forum Expanded Program #3, a curation of four experimental films. Part of the cinema spectacle in a case like this is watching many people get up and walk out of a screening they just waited over an hour to get into, to be replaced by people waiting outside who didn’t get in initially but hung out anyway in case a spot might open up.

2018.02.19