Film Festival Reports – Page 12

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2020: DO STUFF AND GET MONEY FOR IT ALL THE TIME: TWO FILMS ON LABOR, FIFTY YEARS APART

By Adina Glickstein

At this year’s Berlinale, the program from the original International Forum of New Cinema was re-screened in full, presenting a slate of films from 1971 with half a century of retrospect. This first-ever Forum coincided with the year that the U.S. fully abandoned the Bretton Woods system, departing from the Gold Standard in a shift that arguably engendered the onset of neoliberalism. Martin Jacques identifies 1972 as the year that the top ten percent of incomes began to skyrocket while those of the lower third stagnated or fell; the establishment of the WTO, the dual leviathan of Reaganite-Thatcherism, and the push towards deregulation were all soon to follow.

2020.02.27

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2020: FIRST COW BY KELLY REICHARDT

By Mónica Delgado

Generally in western, as a male territory, best friends become rivals. Either because they fight for money, women or family quarrels. This is the case, for example, in George Seaton’s Showdown (1973), where Dean Martin and Rock Hudson end up becoming enemies, since one becomes a sheriff and the other a villain; plus they fall in love with the same woman.

2020.02.25

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2020: LÚA VERMELLA BY LOIS PATIÑO

By Mónica Delgado

The film opens with a map of past times. The sea will be the character and element which orders and reorders the world, where a man will enter its waters, only to return to the land a series of lost bodies. Lúa vermella is a film where the sea is also a ghostly being, that frightens and feeds, shelters and repels, but above else, an entity whose matter could embody in its fury or depths, some passages of the characters of a town in their fight against the inevitable.

2020.02.24

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2020: HER NAME WAS EUROPA BY ANJA DORNIEDEN Y JUAN DAVID GONZÁLES MONROY (OJOBOCA)

By Mónica Delgado

In certain performances by Ojoboca (a duo formed by Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy), a certain motif is recognized which appears in some of their short films: the urgency of fables or the construction of fictitious tales, but supported in scientific or historic arguments.

2020.02.23

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2020: FREM BY VIERA CAKANYOVÁ

By Mónica Delgado

Young Slovakian filmmaker Viera Cákanyová poses in Frem (Czech Republic, Slovakia, 2019), a different approach to the representation of territories almost devoid of human presence. In time where the resource of the drone is synonym of postcard-type shots or advertising kind-of-material, a film like this poses itself as an exploration of everything that the dispositive implies as an experimentation tool.

2020.02.23

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2020: MALMKROG BY CRISTI PUIU

By Mónica Delgado

Some years ago, Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu gave an acting workshop at Les Chantiers Nomades center in Toulouse, where the actors and actresses had to work based in the book Three Dialogues and the Tale of the Antichrist, from the philosopher, theologian and Russian writer Vladimir Soloviev.

2020.02.22

desistfilm

IFFR 2020: DEATH WILL COME AND SHALL HAVE YOUR EYES BY JOSÉ LUIS TORRES LEIVA

By José Sarmiento-Hinojosa

Radical intimacy. In some way, I’ve found difficult to find another term that defines the experience I had watching José Luis Torres Leiva’s latest film, Vendrá la Muerte y Tendrá tus Ojos (Death Will Come and Shall Have your Eyes, 2019).

2020.02.05

desistfilm

IFFR 2020: INTERVIEW WITH MALOU REYMANN, DIRECTOR OF A PERFECTLY NORMAL FAMILY

By Gojko Dimic

At last nights’ IFFR world premiere of “A Perfectly Normal Family“, directed by the Danish filmmaker Malou Reymann, the entire cinema gave a standing ovation to the stunning debut feature. This fascinating story follows an 11 year old girl Emma whose entire world suddenly changes its course when her father Thomas tells her and her sister Caro that he wants to become a woman. Now, a story like that has been told many times, a struggle of a transgender person to find acceptance from their family and the world at large.

2020.01.30

Film Festival Reports

IFFR 2020: LAGUNA NEGRA BY FELIPE ESPARZA

By Wilder Zumarán Sarmiento

Our species was and has always been spawning and instituting myths surrounding its quotidian existence and metaphysics. While it’s usually thought that these narrations are exclusive from the rural world, this is an element that transverses everything: family, money, the individual, eternal life the idea of progress, for example, are myths in which some of our societies are built.

2020.01.29

Film Festival Reports

IFFR 2020: KRABI 2562 BY BEN RIVERS AND ANOCHA SUWICHAKORNPONG

By Jessica McGoff

What year is it? The year referenced in the title of the latest collaboration between Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong, Krabi, 2562, is the present day as designated by the Buddhist calendar. The decision not to state the common (Western) year immediately introduces a slippage into the film’s sense of time and place. Slippage is the central tenant of the project, the film knocks time, identity and memory slightly off-balance, and questions how these concepts are constructed by humans. In its unfolding, the film demonstrates how the Holocene can run into the Anthropocene and back again.

2020.01.29