Film Festival Reports

Cannes

CANNES 2019: ZOMBI CHILD BY BERTRAND BONELLO

By Mónica Delgado

Zombie Child by Bertrand Bonello is a film made of cinema. Meaning, it’s soaked with a fantastic cinematographic legacy of over half a century, and, like the character in his film, rebuilds itself and brings it back to life in the middle of this Cannes film festival, through a tale that derives in a symbolic manifesto that looks to heal the barbarism of French colonization in Haiti. And Bonello doesn’t leave his guard down, quite the contrary; he has made the first great film I’ve seen in these past days. A must-see, which requires more than one viewing.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: SORRY WE MISSED YOU BY KEN LOACH

By Mónica Delgado

Ken Loach is up for his third Golden Palm with Sorry we missed you, a film of work labor treated as a family melodrama. Everything seemed to link this film to the “soap opera” I, Daniel Blake, hinting to a diptych, since they both have male leads living the transgressions of a system which doesn’t protect the worker. However, the bad taste that his 2016 film left crumbles in the first minutes, to promise a disenchanted tale about this fad of the franchise job (Uber, Glovo and such), but this time in the stage of a business that delivers packages in some city of the United Kingdom.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: SONG WITHOUT A NAME BY MELINA LEÓN

By Mónica Delgado

Beyond the well-known phrase “based in real events” that appears at the beginning, Melina León’s Canción sin nombre (Song without a name) is a film which creates nebulous and saddened atmospheres of a Lima amidst political chaos in the eighties. Made in 4:3, this almost squared vision, is used to good purpose from the introduction, a sort of presentation that gives the sensation that being inside a T.V. screen, with textures that imitate 8mm film that show newspapers’ headlines with news of that decade, or with scenes, like the former president Alan García Perez (now deceased by suicide), one of the responsible of the hiper inflation in the country, and the moral and social drama the characters live.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: BACURAU BY KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO AND JULIANO DORNELLES

By Mónica Delgado

Bacurau arrived to Cannes’ oficial competition with high expectations after its predecessor Aquarius. Both films not only share Sonia Braga but also explore the social diversity through the radiography or the allegoric framework. However, Bacurau goes beyond and marks a different tone. It could be seen as a new chapter in the filmography of Kleber Mendonça Filho, which blurs the already known style of the filmmaker.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: LES MISÉRABLES BY LADJ LY

By Mónica Delgado

Les misérables by French filmmaker Ladj Ly had all the elements to promise a real feat: a filmmaker who comes from the marginal Arab and African suburbs of France, actors of the same community ready to play as gang members, a pop review of the heart of Victor Hugo’s work about the excesses of legality and the revenge of poverty, and a police story / thriller that takes the streets by storm. However, these elements are wasted for an unforgivable concession to a festival formula that insists on portraying social issues from the codes of miserabilism and the urgency to calm the guilt through a “social” or realist cinema.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: LITIGANTE BY FRANCO LOLLI

By Mónica Delgado

Litigante is a film about women and could easily be jump (in a marketing way) in the bandwagon of the feminist struggles of current times. However, it isn’t a political film, nor it does propose some premises in times of the me too movement, or less. It also isn’t a film about sexism. What it is, is a measured melodrama from the portrait of a woman who’s affected by the cancer of her mother, and a trial she’s been subjected to by the state, because of a state bidding of a public work.

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Cannes

CANNES 2019: THE DEAD DON’T DIE BY JIM JARMUSCH

By Mónica Delgado

Some years ago, Jim Jarmusch had the privilege, or the fortune to premiere two films in Cannes: Paterson and Gimme Danger, the documentary on The Stooges. This time, not so far away from this past fortune, he also has two precise moments in the French screen, but with the same work: the organization chose his recent comedy about zombies to open this 72th edition of Cannes Film Festival, and also, simultaneously, premiered the film in France to the general audience. Jarmusch is indeed admired in France.

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Film Festival Reports

OBERHAUSEN FILM FESTIVAL 2019: A REPORT

By Vladimir Seput

The International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen celebrated its 65th edition this year in a week starting with Labour Day, 1st of May. Sixty-five years is a long time and its advanced age might show some signs of wear but the festival nevertheless seems to be in a rather good condition to continue for much longer. It again featured hundreds of new shorts, (re)discovered some old ones, brought plenty of filmmakers to Oberhausen (and some classics such as Alexander Sokurov), and dedicated time to invite curators and researchers to work on the new edition of its illustrious Theme.

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Film Festival Reports

IMAGES FESTIVAL 2019: TWO FILMS BY CHRISTOPHER HARRIS

By Ivonne Sheen

Christopher Harris’ films still/here (2001) and A Willing Suspension of Disbelief + Photography and Fetish (2014) unfold the cinematic experience in its experimental practice and the documentary narrative as a possible anthropological hybrid device for profound ethical questions through a self-reflected audiovisual experience.

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