Eng – desistfilm

Eng

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT? REFLECTIONS ON THE THOUGHTS AND DESIRES OF SIX WOMEN IN THE LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL PROGRAM

By Libertad Gills

In The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949), Mary (Ann Todd) is torn between two men: the boring husband (Claude Rains) and the exciting lover (Trevor Howard). She goes back and forth between them, undecided. What does she want? Lean explores cinematic ways of conveying what characters are thinking, with a special emphasis on the female protagonist. Even though she doesn’t voice it herself, the men tell her what she wants and why she cannot have it: her problem is that she “wants to belong to herself” and that’s why she cannot give herself over to romantic love. She will have a “failed life”, warns her lover, and this thought comes back to haunt her leading her to suicidal thoughts and eventually back to her husband’s secure arms.

2025.08.20

Críticas

LOCARNO 2025: LIKE THE STARS IN THE SKY: WITH HASAN IN GAZA BY KAMAL ALJAFARI

By Libertad Gills

After nearly two years of a genocide against the people of Palestine, the film With Hasan in Gaza offers an unexpected beacon of hope. It is not because of what happens in the film but rather because the film exists that the film is hopeful. Let me explain.

Those who have admired Kamal Aljafari’s work for some time will recognize that this is once again a film made with archives. What is surprising, however, is that this time the archives are not material filmed by another. For the first time, Aljafari is working with material that he filmed himself.

2025.08.10

Eng

MOMENTS OF ENDEAVOR: THE 19TH PUNTO DE VISTA INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL OF NAVARRA

By Jay Kuehner

The sorrow of exile is built into the very architecture of A While at the Border, Ileana Dell’Unti’s epistolic portrait of two sisters whose lives are cleaved apart during the advent of the Argentine military dictatorship; one, Claudia, fleeing for Sweden (having escaped via Uruguay); the other, Julia, remaining in the north of Argentina. The kidnap and torture of the former, briefly alluded to in the film’s prologue, is the haunting factor in an otherwise mundane exposition – integral to the film’s contrapuntal formal design – of various public spaces that ‘backdrop’ an exchange of voiced letters between the sisters, now a world apart.

2025.07.01

Eng

THE ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL IN THE AGE OF AUTHORITARIANISM

By Joe Miller

For me, the defining film of the 63rd Ann Arbor Film Festival was one that screened on the final night and didn’t receive any awards: The Geneva Mechanism: A Ghost Movie by Péter Lichter. Described as “the ghosts of celluloid return to haunt digital space,” it’s a five-minute-long meditation on an old film projector, shot in black and white and copiously manipulated and de- and re-constructed with digital effects that make it seem as though it’s intruding into our consciousnesses from across the spheres

2025.06.06

Eng

IN ME THERE IS THE INTRUDER: ON CLAIRE DENIS AND JEAN-LUC NANCY’S L’INTRUS

By Vedant Srinivas

To watch Claire Denis’ L’intrus is to undergo a slow contamination. What contaminates is not something concrete or knowable but contamination itself, its ever-present possibility and threat. Denis’ elliptical approach to filmmaking is well known to those familiar with her body of work. And yet, there is something dangerously porous about L’intrus, an openness that belies all attempts at mastery, much like the wind —arguably one of its principal characters— that susurrates across Denis’ film, unconstrained and free.

2024.12.17

Eng

INTERVIEW: SOFIA BOHDANOWICZ AND ‘MEASURES FOR A FUNERAL’

By Ryan Akler-Bishop
In our conversation, we discuss the cruelty of Toronto architecture, how archival research informs Bohdanowicz’s filmmaking practice, her cinema as a personal art journal, tensions between structured and improvisational shoots, the influence of samurai movies, and her forthcoming projects.

2024.10.11

Artículos

“THESE PRECIOUS HANDS…”: AN ATTEMPT TO CONDENSE THE CINEMATIC WORK OF IM KWON-TAEK

by Claudia Siefen-Leitich

Within his extensive film work, director Im Kwon-taek (born 1934 in Gwangju, South Korea) is concerned with national consciousness and thus with the history of his country. From cultural identity and the class differences associated with it, through to the divided roles of men and women: Im quickly takes the side of the women in order to find his way back to the history of his country through individual fates. The stories he has told since then cannot be imagined, let alone understood, without the basis of Confucianism. Confucius’ teachings are based on the so-called basic virtues such as humanity, a sense of morality and a sense of social justice.

2024.09.23

Eng

LOCARNO 2024: FORMAS DE ATRAVESAR UN TERRITORIO BY GABRIELA DOMÍNGUEZ RUVALCABA

by Nicholas Vroman

Mexican director Gabriela Domínguez Ruvalcaba’s Formas de atravesar un territorio begins with a sly evocation of an ethnographic study of a traditional Tsotsil shepherding family – Don?a Sebastiana and her four daughters – living and working in the hills near San Cristobal de las Casas. Like her previous opus, La danza del hipocampo (2014), the film builds like a Miguel Littin-esqe exploration of place, history, memory, indigenous being in the modern landscape, ways of seeing and the filmmaker’s very place and relation to this world she is documenting.

2024.09.10

Eng

LOCARNO 2024. LISTENING FILMS: A CONVERSATION WITH COURTNEY STEPHENS

By Libertad Gills

I sat down with filmmaker Courtney Stephens during a hot day at the Locarno Film Festival, where her recent film Invention, made in collaboration with Callie Hernandez, who plays the protagonist, has just premiered. Invention is an indie drama/comedy/science fiction about a young woman who loses her father. As she mourns, she speaks to the people who knew him and discovers an electromagnetic healing machine that he created and which she has inherited. She must decide how much she wants to allow herself to open up to his world of invention and belief.

2024.08.22

Eng

THE CURSE OF SILENCE: NEGU HURBILAK

By Nicholas Vroman

Negu Hurbilak (Spain, 2023) opens with an epigram from the song of the same name by Mikel Laboa and Xavier Lete. Laboa and Lete were leaders in the 1960s cultural and political movement to gain political autonomy, if not independence from Spain – and to reclaim Euskara (the Basque language) as the legitimate idiom and voice of the Basque people. Under the aegis of Ez Dok Hamairu, along with along with musicians Benito Lertxundi, Joxean Artze, Jose Angel Irigarai, Lourdes Iriondo and other artists and cultural workers, they made music and produced events that flew in the face of Franco’s cultural repression, which effectively outlawed the use of Euskara in official, public and even, written discourse.

2024.07.17