By Ivonne Sheen
The Calm after the Storm (2020) by young colombian filmmaker Mónica Gaviria is a bright example of these new gazes, which aim to renew and re build new paths in latinamerican filmmaking, and break away from ideologies rooted in past generations, by exposing and question them. The film is part of the competitive section Burning Lights.
By Ivonne Sheen
In the current online edition of the Visions du Réel festival stands out the international competitive section Burning Lights, which is dedicated to formal experimentations and new expressive explorations in recent documentary cinema. Among the section’s films, Mimaroglu: The Robinson of Manhattan Island (2020), the first feature film by Turkish director Serdar Kökçeoglu, creates an audiovisual portrait of the avant-garde and little-known Turkish electronic music composer, Ilhan Mimaroglu.
By Ivonne Sheen
Sky Hopinka’s work is known for an evocation of his ancestors and memory through a contemplation of the landscape. There is a melancholy that trespasses his work as a backbone referred to his Chinook roots. In malni- towards the ocean, towards the shore (2020) the author once again develops a rupture of the common and normal ethnographic approach to native communities. This is the artist’s first feature film, which opened the 33rd edition of the Images Festival 2020.
By Mónica Delgado
Due to its extensive and polemic process of production, Ilya Khrzhanovsky and Jekaterina Oertel’s DAU. Natasha is a work whose value resides in how to detect the frontiers of fiction, to hunt those moments where the true catharsis of the real comes to float. At least, in my case, it was an uncomfortable exercise, since the non-professional actors and actresses let us see in several situations the way they assaulted with agency some scenes in a free way, in their own way, but submitted nevertheless to certain specific rules for the shooting. The filmmaker’s yoke, contained and destroyed, inside the fictional limits, to achieve moments of sudden commotion.
By Mónica Delgado
In program 9 of this edition of Forum expanded, three short films were shown that from their peculiarities, could confront a current panorama of conceptual proposals. From a variety of supports and aesthetics, they keep a tradition not only with the so-called “structural cinema” but also between them, creating a sort of correspondence among the works. What could have in common a short film in 16mm, in black and white, which describes a bureaucratic process from the perspective of the body, or a camera-less work in 70mm that only has one apparent field of color variations? Or the digital baroque proposal of Graeme Arnfield?
By Felix Ernesto Arias Hück
South Korean filmmaker and writer Bora Lee-Kil has made a medium length film and two long documentaries so far. At the latest edition of Berlinale Talents, Doc Station, she presented her new documentary project Our Bodies, an intergenerational dialogue between Koreans. Who talks? With whom? About what? How and where?
By Mónica Delgado
Malayan filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang begins his new film Days (Rizi) with a text: “This film doesn’t have subtitles intentionally”. The warning caused laughter in the room of Berlinale Palast, in the middle of a press showing. It wasn’t a little thing, specially since days before, Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho made a defense of subtitling, at the Golden Globes Award, as a symbol of oppenness to certain cinema outside of Hollywood.
By Mónica Delgado
The program 6 of Forum Expanded was particularly interesting for me. And this doesn’t have to do with the quality of the films shown, but the criteria used to select them and group them. Laura Huertas Millán’s Jíibe, Jonathas de Andrade’s Jogos Dirigidos and Ava Vaz’s Apiyemiyekî? were all projected in this sesion, three works that have as a common denominator being solely from Latin America.
By Mónica Delgado
As with some recent films of Hong Sang-soo, women are in the center of a series of tales, where the usual stylistic motives of the Korean filmmaker remain. But in a clear difference to the rest of his filmography, here, in this film at the Berlinale’s official competition, the men are left.
By Mónica Delgado
Romance understood as a fortuitous and tragic fact is the motif behind several films by Christian Petzold. In Transit, for example, the same protagonists of Undine (the magnificent pair of Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski) are submitted to destines indifference, where sublimation in times of war is impossible. Or like in Jerichow, where sexual attraction is the path to hell. Instead, in Undine, with a bit more complacent tone, without the stylistic bets of his previous works, the context doesn’t matter much; instead the filmmaker is focused in offering a romantic tale in every sense, which includes mythical beings and love sacrifices.
Director: Mónica Delgado Ch.
ISSN 2311-7451
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