By Mónica Delgado
Egyptian filmmaker Abu Bakr Shawky’s Yomeddine is a film which starts with a simple premise, or even part of some new age tale: filial love and friendship as supreme values to be rescued. The first film of Shawky seems to have borrowed some ideas from Tod Browning’s Freaks, but with a softer, bland treatment, to show them under the marvelous influence of Disney’s world and its sobering messages.
By Mónica Delgado
In a particular passage of the eight hours and twenty minutes of Dead Souls, the sterile and deserted plains of Gansu province, in northern China, are composed not only of dirt and dry plants but also skulls and other bones that are testimony of the massacres product of the extermination practices in the reeducation camps after the Cultural Revolution, created in 1955. Wang Bing, unlike his other films, delivers all his footage to give voice to a group of dissidents of the Communist Party, militants of the right or citizens with no political affiliation.
By Mónica Delgado
A film with an unrefined ending, that wants to be open or insinuating, an ending that leaves in evidence a filmmaker lost in translation (of script and atmospheres). A weak film to start te festival, hoping it isn’t a forecast of the quality of the next films we’ll see in the next days here in Cannes.
By Tiago Freitas
Although the film is in its nature very lively and even funny sometimes, we can’t help but watch all of with the notion that this kind of summer dream that the trio of the boy and two girls are living has an eminent end. The guy has to go to the army to fight in the Algeria war so there is this idea of departure with uncertain return hoovering over the film. In typical Nouvelle Vague fashion, Rozier inserts this social comment in the film’s setting although not in a way as pronounced as in some of his Nouvelle Vague counterparts’ films (Adieu Philippine was released in 1962, the year in which the Algerian War ended so it was very actual, socially speaking, at the time of its release).
By Alonso Castro
In Streetscapes [Dialogue] (2017) Heinz Emigholz proposes us with a complex exercise in the reconstruction of space and time through the montage, in which architecture predominates -displaying beautiful images of buildings’ dimensions and textures-, as well as dialogue. Through pictures of buildings designed by Julio Vilamajó, Eladio Dieste, Arno Brandlhuber, among other architects, in the fourth part of the series of Streetscapes [Dialogue], Emiglhoz reflects on the durability of time through space from the link between architecture and cinema.
By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
In the realm of identity, being confronted with the crude reality of the world we’re inhabiting may be birthing a sort of cognitive dissonance: we’re not what we used to be, or we must switch our identities in order to survive. Hiwa K and Korakrit Arunanondchai take two very different approaches on the subject, one could say approaches that emerge from the uncertainty of representation.
By Morella Moret and José Sarmiento Hinojosa
A struggle poem is sung, thousands of women join to rebel against patriarchy and misoginy every March 9th, but we’re still abused. We’re killed because we’re rebels, raped because we’re whores, beaten for being insolent. Sangre Seca by Los Ingrávidos Collective shows us 16mm red and bloody images, footage of woman marching for our rights, of different historical moments of Mexican activism.
By Tara Judah
One mode of transparency is in admitting that temporal and spatial distance meant I didn’t physically attend Images Festival. This relegates my observations of the films I watched deficient, insofar as they are subject to the rarity and the ‘live-ness’ of their intent: I did not experience the atmosphere or energy of curated and presented programmes. Still, in the interests of opacity, I engaged with select content on my own terms and, in so doing, created my own rare event.
By Tara Judah
Courtisane saw me first. It gestured for me to come and I followed. That was a year ago, but the memory is as viscid as lacquer just applied. This year, I came without call. The invitation to participate in the art at Courtisane is a gesture of repetition, and one that extends into discovering an alternate history of cinema; not for its refusal of the canon but owing to its sincere interest in something altogether else.
By Ivonne Sheen
In In the stillness of sounds, we follow closely to the engineer and sound artist Marc Namblard. We learn about his family, his friends, his environment; but first of all, we learn about his art: the art of sounds. The special thing about his work is the sources he use and his dedication to find the sublime in nature’s sound ecosystem.
Director: Mónica Delgado Ch.
ISSN 2311-7451
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