By Nicholas Vroman
Helmut Dosantos’ Gods of Mexico (Dioses de Mexico, 2022) is a startlingly inventive ethnographic meditation on indigenous communities in Mexico. The film is divided into 3 sections – a fourth if you happen to be able to see the longer version at the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City (as explained in the interview).
By Katy Montoya
Many in this year’s selection of short films in the Umbrales section of FICUNAM 13 demonstrate different ways of conceiving the magnitude of destruction that defines our present moment. As seen in these pieces, our destruction— ours because we have no choice but to embrace it as part of us and our doing— insidiously infiltrates the most hidden nooks of our psyches as it seeps into the deepest reserves of our groundwater. But here, our responses to destruction can also find fresh roots. As Tsing asks, “How else can we account for the fact that anything is alive in the mess we have made?”
By Katy Montoya
Naomi Uman is known for her experimental and intervened in film like Removed and Hand-Eye Coordination. Her reflections on the gaze over women’s bodies don’t fall into a simplistic anti porn stance or reduce the desire to see women’s bodies to a masculine whim. Other segments of her work can be characterized by an impulse to reach out into the world that is accompanied intimately by an impulse to reach inward and make herself vulnerable.
Por José Sarmiento Hinojosa
Imaginar posibles futuros como acto de resistencia. Las ficciones especulativas como alternativas de pensamiento decolonial son una práctica bienvenida en la región en la última década, especialmente si pensamos en la obra que ha salido de estas iniciativas: filmes notables como Anhell69 de Theo Montoya (2022) o Mato Seco en Chamas de Adirley Queiróz y Joana Pimenta (2022) filmes que trabajan sobre la reconfiguración de lo simbólico, que imaginan líneas paralelas de tiempo en donde las resistencias se dan a través de “fantasmagorias eróticas” (Valentina Giraldo sobre Anhell69) o “arcadias perdidas” (como es el universo regido por mujeres de Mato Seco en Chamas.
By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
Configurar a que nos referimos con “apariciones” en el cine, nos demanda entrar a fondo sobre decenas de cuestiones que han habitado la memoria del mismo desde su invención. El cine, como influjo, como rito, como ceremonia, invoca a una aparición desde su propio inicio. Ese lure Barthesiano de la sala del cine nos prepara para una primera fantasmagoría, el contrato social en donde nos sometemos a la invocación de la imagen. En este última edición de Cinema Du Réel, me interesó sobremanera conjugar algunas formas de aparición en la pantalla, las cuales se suceden a partir de los filmes de James Benning, Deborah Stratman, Sharon Lockhart, Pablo Mazollo, Heinz Emigholz y Luke Fowler.
By Nicholas Vroman
Jorge Cuchí’s first feature film, 50 (or Two Whales Meet on the Beach) snagged a trifecta of awards at the 2021 Morelia International Film Festival – The Ojo Award for Best Mexican Feature Film along with Best Actress and Actor awards. A former advertising industry maven, Cuchí, unenthused by a future promoting products, turned to his first love, cinema, to create stories and engage in issues that had much more importance to him.
by Claudia Siefen-Leitich
The love, or simply the affinity, for analogue cinema is still easy to describe: working with analogue film never ends, it even continues during every projection. You hear the sounds coming out oft he projection room, watching the reel change marks on screen when it comes to a 35mm print, or you experience a projection of 8mm or Super 8, the projectors installed right in the middle of the audience!
José Sarmiento Hinojosa
En el programa documental colectivo “A Sense of Place”, seis cineastas iraníes cuentan historias de lugares en Irán o en el exilio. El programa ha sido creado por la productora Afsun Moshiry en colaboración con la Fundación Wim Wenders, y las películas se han desarrollado en estrecha colaboración con Wim Wenders y Hella Wenders. – CPH:DOXA Sense of Place incluye los trabajos de Mohammadreza Farzad (Hollow), Shirin Barghnavard (Density of Emptiness), Azin Faizabadi (Shadowless – In Transit), Pooya Abassian (Mal Tourné), Afsaneh Salari (Great Are the Eyes of a Dead Father), and Mina Keshavarz (Phobos). – CPH:DOX
Is it possible, perhaps, that we arrived too late for the ancestors? Is it acceptable to neutralize and erase centuries of colonial violence through the continuation of a movement of planetary annihilation? Against the apparent global triumph of artifice we assert a frontier-zone audiovisual meditation: It is not too late for being-earth.
Por José Sarmiento Hinojosa
Encontrar las variables sobre las que descansa la lógica de programación de un festival como Berwick es particularmente desafiante. En efecto, hay un decante sobre un cine más arriesgado, cercano a lo que hemos llegado a llamar “experimental” y de un tono particularmente contemporáneo.
Directors:
Mónica Delgado Ch.
José Sarmiento Hinojosa
ISSN 2311-7451
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