By Ivonne Sheen
A friend become like a ghost was the 8th program of the past Crossroads 2019 edition, which took place in San Francisco, California. The amazingness of this event is found in the subtlety of the curatorial work in it, paints and invokes the powerful expansive states of experimental filmmaking under mystical and poetical premises. A friend become like a ghost is an encounter with light, with film, with ourselves as light and shadow, as life and death.
By Tara Judah
Courtisane saw me first. It gestured for me to come and I followed. That was a year ago, but the memory is as viscid as lacquer just applied. This year, I came without call. The invitation to participate in the art at Courtisane is a gesture of repetition, and one that extends into discovering an alternate history of cinema; not for its refusal of the canon but owing to its sincere interest in something altogether else.
Por Hugo Amoedo
La apuesta de esta edición de Courtisane volvía a tener un marcado carácter político. La selección del certamen giraba alrededor de una decena de programas de cortometrajes de cine de vanguardia, comisariados en su mayor parte por María Palacios Torres -antigua directora del festival-, y tres focos sobre la obra de Wang Bing, la cineasta belga Anik Leroy y el indio Mani Kaul.
by Tara Judah
Courtisane, as a festival, far more than most, creates its fiction with all the skill and care that curation ought. The films are selected – not for their timeliness or premiere status, but for their ability to engage and provoke curiosity – and are shown in the hope of sharing something as simple yet powerful as “notes on cinema”. The notes, with all the hallmarks of great fiction, are quite simply an invitation to inquiry.
