Film Festival Reports

Diagonale

DIAGONALE 2018: AN OVERVIEW

By Dennis Vetter

Since 2016 the Diagonale has taken place under the direction of Sebastian Höglinger and Peter Schernhuber, who introduced the “In Referenz” programme as their most striking statement, a rail that should show lines of thought and spaces of possibility between the festival sections. Here, for example, film programmes comment on specific exhibitions, while Austrian productions meet international works or current perspectives meet historical ones. The section embodies a curatorial freedom within the program that is lacking in its consequence at many comparable events. A very welcome enrichment, then! And a call to search for connecting lines with a sharpened view, not to look at cinema in a vacuum, but to question its roots and obligations time and again.

2018.03.22

CPH:DOX

CPH:DOX 2018: WEAPON OF CHOICE BY FRITZ OFNER

Tara Judah

From Iraq to Chi-raq, the story of the most popular weapon of choice anywhere in the world is of the Austrian Glock. It’s first large scale take up by the Austrian police and military in the early 1980s, for its safety and reliability, set the Glock pistol’s success story in motion. It is now the proverbial weapon of choice for everyone from US law enforcement and street gangs to IS jihadists and was even coveted by Saddam Hussein.

2018.03.22

Cinéma du Réel

CINÉMA DU RÉEL 2018: CENTRAL AIRPORT THF BY KARIM AÏNOUZ

By Pablo Gamba

Central Airport THF (Zentralflughafen THF, 2018) is a film about the airport of Tempelhof, in Berlin. It was recognized as such in 1923 and the Nazi regime developed it until it transformed the terminal into the biggest building in the world. Occupied by the Americans and transformed in a military base after World War II, it was used as the aerial bridge that supplied the occidental side of the city when the Soviet Union impeded the fluvial and terrestrial access in 1948. The airport was closed in 2008 and transformed in a park in 2010. But since 2015 it serves another function: a refugee camp was stablished there; welcoming refugees recently arrived in Germany.

2018.03.22

CPH:DOX

CPH:DOX 2018: THE END OF FEAR BY BARBARA VISSER

By Tara Judah

Speaking with great fervour, Dutch devotees of Barnett Newman’s large abstract painting, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1967), detail their personal and collective pain over Gerard Jan van Bladeren’s knife attack on the painting in 1986. Speaking more passionately still, experts from the art world decry the utter catastrophe that followed when Daniel Goldreyer incompetently restored the work in 1991 using controversial and aesthetically damaging methods. The story is not just well known in The Netherlands, it has become legend and is a collective source of pride-turned-pain as well as one of outward sheer bemusement.

2018.03.21

Cinéma du Réel

CINÉMA DU RÉEL 2018: JENY303 BY LAURA HUERTAS MILLÁN AND THE WHITE ELEPHANT BY SHURUQ HARB

By Pablo Gamba

Laura Huertas Millán’s Jeny303 and Shuruq Harb’s The White Elephant, (both part of the short film competition in Cinéma du Reel) are films realized by female artists and filmmakers, about identity political issues. In the first case, the film owes its existence to a malfunction of the 16mm camera used in the film. This is the kind of accidents that fascinated the surrealists, and the filmmaker chose to include the result.

2018.03.21

Cinéma du Réel

CINÉMA DU RÉEL 2018: THE TREES BY MARIANO LUQUE

By Pablo Gamba

The Trees (2017) is the first documentary long feature by Mariano Luque, and thus, it figures in the competition of feature films of Cinéma du Réel. But in a strict sense, this is the third film of this duration of the Argentinian filmmaker, who is one of the most prominent figures of the province of Córdoba, together with Rosendo Ruiz –born in San Juan-, Santiago Loza and Matías Lucchesi, among others. Luque was in the festivals of Berlin and San Sebastian with Salsipuedes (2011) –and its short version in Cannes Cinéfondation-; with Another Mother (2017) he participated in Rotterdam, and with both in BAFICI.

2018.03.21

CPH:DOX

CPH-DOX 2018: BISBEE ’17 BY ROBERT GREEN

By Mónica Delgado

American documentary filmmaker Robert Green keeps in Bisbeee’ 17 –which is competing in the official section of CPH:DOX- the line between non-fiction, docudrama and testimony, all trademarks of his previous works. But this time, he proposes a generational and political reading on an underground event in American history, the deportation of more than a thousand syndicalists in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917, as a product of an arbitrary system of work in a mining community.

2018.03.20

CPH:DOX

CPH-DOX 2018: THE DISTANT BARKING OF DOGS BY SIMON LERENG WILMONT AND JANE BY BRETT MORGEN

By Pablo Gamba

The Distant Barking of Dogs (2017), awarded in Amsterdam’s IDFA, and winner of the Golden Alexander and the Critics’ Prize in Thessaloniki, and Jane (2017), which participated in the same Dutch festival and was awarded the Critics’ Choice Award for best documentary, are prime examples of modalities of representations that still dominate these kind of films nowadays, despite the problems they represent.

2018.03.16

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2018: ARGENTINIAN CINEMA, ITS FICTIONS AND UNCERTAINTIES

By Aldo Padilla

Despite not having a film in the official selection, the vast presence of Argentina in different sections deserves a text of its own for the eclecticism of the different proposals and its strong feminine presence. Argentina, in contrast to Brazil and Chile, has bet strongly towards fiction (except for Lola Arias’ film Theatre of War or Pino Solanas’ documentary A Journey to the Fumigated Towns).

2018.03.01

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2018: MUSEUM BY ALONSO RUIZPALACIOS

By Aldo Padilla

The Chilean documentary Stealing Rodin (Robar a Rodin, 2017) starts from the idea of the presence-absence of a work of art, idea that emerged from the theft of a work by the French sculptor by an art student, which generated an enormous amount of visits to the museum showing the exposition. The thief posed that his robbery was part of a performance that showed that the absence of the work had an artistic justification, an effect on society which made it move massively towards the empty cabinet. “We don’t appreciate something until we lose it”. In the case of the Mexican film Museum (Museo), another premise is added: that something that one doesn’t know is lost can’t be appreciated.

2018.02.26

desistfilm

DIAGONALE 2018: AN OVERVIEW

CPH:DOX 2018: WEAPON OF CHOICE BY FRITZ OFNER

CINÉMA DU RÉEL 2018: CENTRAL AIRPORT THF BY KARIM AÏNOUZ

CPH:DOX 2018: THE END OF FEAR BY BARBARA VISSER

CINÉMA DU RÉEL 2018: JENY303 BY LAURA HUERTAS MILLÁN AND THE WHITE ELEPHANT BY SHURUQ HARB

CINÉMA DU RÉEL 2018: THE TREES BY MARIANO LUQUE

CPH-DOX 2018: BISBEE ’17 BY ROBERT GREEN

CPH-DOX 2018: THE DISTANT BARKING OF DOGS BY SIMON LERENG WILMONT AND JANE BY BRETT MORGEN

BERLINALE 2018: ARGENTINIAN CINEMA, ITS FICTIONS AND UNCERTAINTIES

BERLINALE 2018: MUSEUM BY ALONSO RUIZPALACIOS

desistfilm