Film Festival Reports

IMAGES FESTIVAL 2018: PERFECT FILM, THE RARE EVENT, 3 DREAMS OF HORSES

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.

2018.04.16

Courtisane

COURTISANE 2018: GESTURE AND F(OL)LOW

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.

2018.04.10

Cinéma du Réel

CINÉMA DU REEL 2018: IN THE STILLNESS OF SOUNDS BY SERGE STEYER AND STÉPHANE MANCHEMATIN

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.

2018.04.04

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

desistfilm

IMAGES FESTIVAL 2018: PERFECT FILM, THE RARE EVENT, 3 DREAMS OF HORSES

COURTISANE 2018: GESTURE AND F(OL)LOW

CINÉMA DU REEL 2018: IN THE STILLNESS OF SOUNDS BY SERGE STEYER AND STÉPHANE MANCHEMATIN

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

desistfilm