Film Festival Reports

Eng

CPH:DOX 2023 – IRAN IS SLIPPING THROUGH OUR FINGERS / IRAN SE NOS CUELA ENTRE LOS DEDOS (ENG/SPA)

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

2023.04.12

Eng

EARTH – PROGRAM BY COLECTIVO LOS INGRÁVIDOS (FILMFEST DRESDEN – INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM FESTIVAL)

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.

2023.04.09

Eng

THE MODERN DANCE: 18TH BERWICK FILM & MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL (SPA/ENG)

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.

2023.03.22

Berlinale

WE ARE ALL MADE OF STARS – DEBORAH STRATMAN’S LAST THINGS @ BERLINALE (ENG/SPA)

By Irina Trocan

Seeing Deborah Stratman’s medium-length film in the Forum Expanded section of the Berlinale means taking an unrepentant break from the hectic rhythm of the festival – in the end, you may conclude midway through the screening, none of this really matters, and when we consume our life on this planet we’ll only be a thin layer of dust that covers the rocks. As mankind’s impact on Earth is more demonstrably damaging from decade to decade, the least cinema can do about it is to accommodate views that don’t place humans at the center of everything. Last Things is a definite model for such an eco-cinematic approach.

2023.03.14

Cannes

CANNES 2022: THREE MEN AND LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA

By Monica Delgado The 75th edition of the Cannes Film Festival barely included a Latin American film in its official competition. It was the Costa

2022.06.04

Cannes

CANNES 2022: DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA BY VÉRÉNA PARAVEL AND LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR

By Monica Delgado

Premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight, as part of the 75th Cannes Film Festival, De humani corporis fabrica by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor is an immersion in the world of a group of French public hospitals and morgues. Cesarean sections, prostate operations, cornea prostheses, spinal cord repairs, mastectomies, and other topics that are reserved for the view and work of medical personnel, are extracted from their natural space to become a process of observation before new spectators.

2022.06.04

Artículos

40 FESTIVAL CINEMATOGRÁFICO INTERNACIONAL DE URUGUAY: A REVIEW

By Joe Miller The defining moment of the 40th International Film Festival of Uruguay came during the question-and-answer period after the screening of Delia (2021),

2022.05.29

Cannes

CANNES 2022: R.M.N. BY CRISTIAN MUNGIU

By Monica Delgado

After Graduation (Bacalaureat, 2016), Cristi Mungiu returns to the screens in R.M.N. with a story that works as a social allegory about racism, classism and fascism, which is set in a Transylvanian commune. Describing the characteristics of the seed of fascism, or even more, the very nature of that social and political defect, is the emotional material with which the filmmaker builds the sensitivity of a racialized society -and that racializes- from within Europe and also as part of the periphery. More than talking about the origin of a type of fascism, Mungiu approaches a sociological thesis, by showing an x-ray of a multiethnic and diverse people, who have suffered exclusion throughout the history of Europe, and who are capable, also of exercising violence on others. In Mungiu’s fiction, there is no mercy in the act of ethnic contempt.

2022.05.24

Cannes

CANNES 2022: BROTHER AND SISTER BY ARNAUD DESPLECHIN

By Monica Delgado

With more than a dozen films to his credit, Arnaud Desplechin has made it clear at Cannes 2022 that his desire to make movies is going through a bad time. What he captures in Frère et soeur (Brother and sister) shows wear and tear, but also perhaps the decision not to develop what the film suggests, advances or outlines, leaving between the lines as a practical exercise for the viewer.

2022.05.24

Cannes

CANNES 2022: HOLY SPIDER BY ALI ABBASI

By Monica Delgado

As with Boy from Heaven, also in official competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival, Holy Spider is a 100% European production based on an Islamic reality. If in Boy from heaven, the Swede of Egyptian origin Tarik Saleh explores the interior of religious power from its formative levels, in Holy Spider, the Iranian living in Denmark Ali Abbasi formulates a story about a serial killer of sex workers in Mashhad, the second largest city in this Muslim country. Both themes would probably be censored in the countries to which they refer, and that filmmakers with the possibility of making them abroad is an opportunity to discuss issues of social and political fundamentalism (although of course, always with concessions very much in tune with the thematic fashions of the moment in festival spaces like this) and from a moral perspective of the West.

2022.05.24

desistfilm

CPH:DOX 2023 – IRAN IS SLIPPING THROUGH OUR FINGERS / IRAN SE NOS CUELA ENTRE LOS DEDOS (ENG/SPA)

EARTH – PROGRAM BY COLECTIVO LOS INGRÁVIDOS (FILMFEST DRESDEN – INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM FESTIVAL)

THE MODERN DANCE: 18TH BERWICK FILM & MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL (SPA/ENG)

WE ARE ALL MADE OF STARS – DEBORAH STRATMAN’S LAST THINGS @ BERLINALE (ENG/SPA)

CANNES 2022: THREE MEN AND LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA

CANNES 2022: DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA BY VÉRÉNA PARAVEL AND LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR

40 FESTIVAL CINEMATOGRÁFICO INTERNACIONAL DE URUGUAY: A REVIEW

CANNES 2022: R.M.N. BY CRISTIAN MUNGIU

CANNES 2022: BROTHER AND SISTER BY ARNAUD DESPLECHIN

CANNES 2022: HOLY SPIDER BY ALI ABBASI

desistfilm