Film Festival Reports

ROTTERDAM 2019: ALVA BY ICO COSTA AND THE GOLD-LADEN SHEEP & THE SACRED MOUNTAIN BY RIDHAM JANVE

By Aldo Padilla

Ico Costa utilizes a similar planning when he shoots Alva, a film where we can see a man dwelling through the Portuguese forests, seeking shelter, small fruits or water from the river, a river whose sound defines the austerity of the film. Unlike Alonso’s films, Costa’s first feature allow us to be an auditory witness of the ominous crime of the lead character –despite giving few clues about the motives of the killings that he commits- only represented by shotgun shots we hear from a house door a woman just entered.

2019.02.05

Film Festival Reports

ROTTERDAM 2019: NUESTRO TIEMPO BY CARLOS REYGADAS AND THE MOUNTAIN BY RICK ALVERSON

By Aldo Padilla

Not only has the idea of a shared cinematic universe been used in the last year by superhero movies, we can also see in Jian Zhang Ke’s Ash is the purest white how the filmmaker returns to his iconic Still Life lead character (and her famous water bottle). In another example, Happy End of Michael Haneke seems like a bad sequel of his film Amour: this failed pastiche takes elements of all of the filmmaker’s filmography without any subtlety.

2019.02.04

Film Festival Reports

ROTTERDAM 2019: A LAND IMAGINED BY YEO SIEW HUA AND NON-FICTION BY OLIVIER ASSAYAS

By Aldo Padilla

Locarno winner Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined, poses two stories that play in parallel, with a disappeared Chinese migrant and the case investigator. The tale is somewhat similar in structure to some Murakami novels: with several unanswered questions, the shadow of a manic pixie dream girl, a sort of mirror between the characters of the two stories and some elements that get near the supernatural or the oneiric.

2019.02.04

Film Festival Reports

ROTTERDAM 2019: THE WIND BY EMMA TAMMI

By Tara Judah

Perhaps watching a film about stillbirth and the haunting of pregnant women in isolation, while pregnant, was not the wisest of choices I’ve ever made. And yet, I found Emma Tammi’s The Wind (2018) thrilling to watch and enduring as a film I deeply admire for both its bravery in dealing with gendered, domestic themes inside the paradigms of traditionally gender biased genres, and in challenging their tropes whilst remaining just ambiguous enough to please both genre fans and those wanting a more critical exploration.

2019.02.01

Dokufest

DOKUFEST 2018: STEALING MOMENTS, TELLING STORIES, WANTING TO WIN.

By Tara Judah

Winding our way through the verdant folds of a mountainous range that conceals the border between Macedonia and Kosovo, I listen with eager intent to a weathered Liverpudlian named Paul. After the usual polite chit-chat, and with miles of winding road before us, we start to talk in earnest. Paul is a natural storyteller and a charismatic character who must have an inner switch that is permanently set to: endear and entertain.

2019.02.01

Film Festival Reports

MEDIA CITY FILM FESTIVAL 2018: CHOOKA, BY FARAZ & PARASTOO ANOUSHAHPOUR AND RYAN FERKO

By Ivonne Sheen

In Susan Sontag’s famous book, On Photography, she argues that we are living in Plato’s cave made out of reproducible images, questioning about our visual imaginaries, which are not only fed by concrete experience, but also by reproduced images. This argument can be read in Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko’s refined film Chooka (2018), which was part of the Media City Film Festival’s International Competition.

2018.11.13

Film Festival Reports

MEDIA CITY FILM FESTIVAL 2018: DRESDEN DYNAMO BY LIS RHODES & LANDSCAPE (FOR MANON) BY PETER HUTTON

By Alonso Castro

Dresden Dynamo (1972) is one of the films that Lis Rhodes made in her years as a student in the media course at the North East London Polytechnic. Lis Rhodes belonged to the group of avant-garde British filmmakers of the 1970s. Rhodes’ work is recognized for having experimented with the audiovisual language, linking its aesthetic proposal with a political questioning of the conventional forms of both the film field and society.

2018.11.10

25fps

25FPS FILM FESTIVAL: THE SHAPES OF CONTEMPORARY IMAGES

By Petra Belc

More than half a century ago a group of film enthusiasts gathered around cine-club Zagreb to initiate what would decades later be recognized as one of the first festivals of experimental cinema in the European context: GEFF, the Genre Film Festival (1963—1970). In its first edition, inspired by a series of cine-club conversations revolving around the theme of antifilm, the GEFF organizers argued in favour of a pure exploratory cinema

2018.11.07

Film Festival Reports

TIFF 2018. WAVELENGTHS: 1986 SUMMER BY TOSHIO MATSUMOTO

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Made somewhere between Sway (1985) and Engram (1987), Summer 1968 can be considered a transitional work that carries many of the elements of latter-period Matsumoto. For many, Matsumoto is the author behind the masterpiece Funeral Parade of Roses, but little more is popular on his experimental work through the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Many titles such as For the Damaged Right Eye, Atman or Engram carry out a variety of styles, manifestations and intentions, different classifications of the author’s obsessions and milestones of cinema in their own right.

2018.09.18

Film Festival Reports

TIFF 2018. WAVELENGTHS: THE LABYRINTH BY LAURA HUERTAS MILLÁN

By Mónica Delgado

In The Labyrinth, Colombian filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán proposes a bifurcating road: the tale about the ascent and fall of a eccentric drug dealer in the middle of the Amazon jungle, something that little by little is left aside to give place to a local testimony that connects with the environment: the description of a trance and the encounter with the figures and gods that rule those lands.

2018.09.17

desistfilm

ROTTERDAM 2019: ALVA BY ICO COSTA AND THE GOLD-LADEN SHEEP & THE SACRED MOUNTAIN BY RIDHAM JANVE

ROTTERDAM 2019: NUESTRO TIEMPO BY CARLOS REYGADAS AND THE MOUNTAIN BY RICK ALVERSON

ROTTERDAM 2019: A LAND IMAGINED BY YEO SIEW HUA AND NON-FICTION BY OLIVIER ASSAYAS

ROTTERDAM 2019: THE WIND BY EMMA TAMMI

DOKUFEST 2018: STEALING MOMENTS, TELLING STORIES, WANTING TO WIN.

MEDIA CITY FILM FESTIVAL 2018: CHOOKA, BY FARAZ & PARASTOO ANOUSHAHPOUR AND RYAN FERKO

MEDIA CITY FILM FESTIVAL 2018: DRESDEN DYNAMO BY LIS RHODES & LANDSCAPE (FOR MANON) BY PETER HUTTON

25FPS FILM FESTIVAL: THE SHAPES OF CONTEMPORARY IMAGES

TIFF 2018. WAVELENGTHS: 1986 SUMMER BY TOSHIO MATSUMOTO

TIFF 2018. WAVELENGTHS: THE LABYRINTH BY LAURA HUERTAS MILLÁN

desistfilm