Film Festival Reports

Cinéma du Réel

CINÉMA DU REEL 2018: DREAMING UNDER CAPITALISM BY SOPHIE BRUNEAU

By Ivonne Sheen

Deleuze adapts Foucault’s disciplinary societies’ theory to the contemporary ethos, and describes our context as societies of control. The difference resides in the form of the forces that are applied to citizens, that is to say workers. In contemporary societies, control is related to numbers and to monetary flow. In this way, increasing our skills and at the same time submerged in an infinite competitive spiral, that don’t give us an end until we maybe become rich or die. Thriller way of life, that is ours, that is capitalist way of living.

2018.04.04

Cinéma du Réel

CINÉMA DU RÉEL 2018: THE WALDHEIM WALTZ BY RUTH BECKERMANN

By Mónica Delgado

For a time now, some European political estates, like Polish or Hungarian, have been giving their version of history, in a scandalous revisionism, even proposing new legislations that claim their innocence regarding any link and responsibility of Nazi horror during World War II. A while ago, media headlines informed about some Polish politicians, denying the existence of concentration camps in the country at war times, or who signaled that there were as much “polish perpetrators as Jewish ones”, distorting the facts and posing a sort of tabula rasa.

2018.04.02

Cinéma du Réel

CINEMA DU REEL 2018: LAS FUERZAS, BY PAOLA BUONTEMPO AND OPTIMISM DE DEBORAH STRATMAN

By Nicolás Carrasco

From the remote territory of Dawson City, in the Canadian Yukon, Deborah Stratman reminds us of a past that remains frozen in the winter cold. Strongly related to Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time, Stratman’s portrait of this town is not chronological or about film archeology; her main interest is in the study of spaces. Cancan dancers, curling players, smelters of minerals, and a curious disc on the edge of a mountain congregate to form a portrait of the city.

2018.03.28

CPH:DOX

CPH:DOX 2018: EXTINCTION BY SALOME LAMAS

By Aldo Padilla

Salomé Lamas travels again an unknown scenery and leaves aside the relation of man and nature as way of work, to deepen in the strange relation of belonging by men and its concept of nationality, through the rests of the huge shadow that the former Soviet Union left behind, among characters seen as ghosts, reflecting on the legacy of this giant nation that crumbled under its own weight.

2018.03.27

CPH:DOX

CPH:DOX 2018: LEK AND THE DOGS, A LUDORAMA ABOUT WALTER BENJAMIN

By Alonso Castro

Andrew Kotting’s Lek and the Dogs is rework on Hattie Naylor’s book Ivan and the dogs. The plot narrates the life of Ivan Mishukov’s as a child, when he abandons his home to live in the streets of Moscow, and starts coexisting with a group of street dogs. It’s a history based in real events. // Inside the Artists and auteurs section, Carlos Ferrand’s 13, a Ludorama About Walter Benjamin was exhibited. A film in 13 chapters, it documents the life of German philosopher Walter Benjamin during his exile in France, from 1933 to 1940.

2018.03.27

CPH:DOX

CPH:DOX 2018: BLACK MOTHER BY KHALIK ALLAH

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Black Mother deals with the identity of black women in Jamaica: religious women, old women, school girls, prostitutes. They are all part of the spiritual environment of the country, each of them part of the genesis of men. Birth and nature, faces like territories, history marked in each wrinkle, in each crevasse of the face.

2018.03.27

Cinéma du Réel

CINÉMA DU REEL 2018: L. COHEN BY JAMES BENNING

by José Sarmiento Hinojosa

One of the most relevant things about James Benning’s films is how they immediately relate to their audience. Benning’s work statism and absence of occurrences (in the typical sense of the word), can defy the patience of any veteran cinephile, yet along any newcomer who would be immediately taken aback by the realization that “nothing’s happening”. Indeed, this gesture of the avant-garde instantly reflects on the spectator: Benning’s films are very much about them as they are about the subject who is watching them.

2018.03.26

Cinéma du Réel

CINÉMA DU REEL 2018: INFINITE FOOTBAL BY CORNELIU PORUMBOIU

by José Sarmiento Hinojosa

In one of the latest scenes of the film we travel an empty highway towards civilization. It’s a beautiful scene, since it breaks out the lonely state of its lead character, but also the overall feeling of a country full of expectations, a Romania that, being integrated to the European Union, dreamed of progress and welfare, but whose dreams lay lifeless in the thick mud of ungovernability and corruption. Porumboiu has found a perfect excuse, as always, to talk about the state of a country in limbo, in this infinite football game that is life.

2018.03.25

CPH:DOX

CPH:DOX 2018 : GIANTS AND THE MORNING AFTER

By Tara Judah

Oddly billed as ‘a Swedish answer to Twin Peaks’, Giants and the Morning After is anything but. Following the often-mundane activity and conversation of a handful of residents going about their rural lives, Giants has a visual quietude that fits its locale.

2018.03.23

CPH:DOX

CPH:DOX 2018: STAR BY JOHAN LURF

By Ivonne Sheen

The richness and beauty of this film resides in the mirror it becomes to our imagination as a main source for our conscience, and how cinema have shaped human being’s mind and our historical archive. As a technology, its evolution obviously influenced our galaxy’s simulacrum, and the special effects have tried to create an extra-terrestrial experience.

2018.03.23

desistfilm

CINÉMA DU REEL 2018: DREAMING UNDER CAPITALISM BY SOPHIE BRUNEAU

CINÉMA DU RÉEL 2018: THE WALDHEIM WALTZ BY RUTH BECKERMANN

CINEMA DU REEL 2018: LAS FUERZAS, BY PAOLA BUONTEMPO AND OPTIMISM DE DEBORAH STRATMAN

CPH:DOX 2018: EXTINCTION BY SALOME LAMAS

CPH:DOX 2018: LEK AND THE DOGS, A LUDORAMA ABOUT WALTER BENJAMIN

CPH:DOX 2018: BLACK MOTHER BY KHALIK ALLAH

CINÉMA DU REEL 2018: L. COHEN BY JAMES BENNING

CINÉMA DU REEL 2018: INFINITE FOOTBAL BY CORNELIU PORUMBOIU

CPH:DOX 2018 : GIANTS AND THE MORNING AFTER

CPH:DOX 2018: STAR BY JOHAN LURF

desistfilm