By Mónica Delgado
The program 6 of Forum Expanded was particularly interesting for me. And this doesn’t have to do with the quality of the films shown, but the criteria used to select them and group them. Laura Huertas Millán’s Jíibe, Jonathas de Andrade’s Jogos Dirigidos and Ava Vaz’s Apiyemiyekî? were all projected in this sesion, three works that have as a common denominator being solely from Latin America.
By Mónica Delgado
As with some recent films of Hong Sang-soo, women are in the center of a series of tales, where the usual stylistic motives of the Korean filmmaker remain. But in a clear difference to the rest of his filmography, here, in this film at the Berlinale’s official competition, the men are left.
By Mónica Delgado
Romance understood as a fortuitous and tragic fact is the motif behind several films by Christian Petzold. In Transit, for example, the same protagonists of Undine (the magnificent pair of Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski) are submitted to destines indifference, where sublimation in times of war is impossible. Or like in Jerichow, where sexual attraction is the path to hell. Instead, in Undine, with a bit more complacent tone, without the stylistic bets of his previous works, the context doesn’t matter much; instead the filmmaker is focused in offering a romantic tale in every sense, which includes mythical beings and love sacrifices.
By Mónica Delgado
Abel Ferrara’s Siberia is, before anything, a film about drives as non-natural impulses. And this concept is read here in a Freudian sense, where the characters do different actions (in a conscious or unconscious manner) with the end of calming an intense and profound desire, usually of sexual nature. The drives that are satisfied after an unusual and intense search.
By Adina Glickstein
At this year’s Berlinale, the program from the original International Forum of New Cinema was re-screened in full, presenting a slate of films from 1971 with half a century of retrospect. This first-ever Forum coincided with the year that the U.S. fully abandoned the Bretton Woods system, departing from the Gold Standard in a shift that arguably engendered the onset of neoliberalism. Martin Jacques identifies 1972 as the year that the top ten percent of incomes began to skyrocket while those of the lower third stagnated or fell; the establishment of the WTO, the dual leviathan of Reaganite-Thatcherism, and the push towards deregulation were all soon to follow.
By Mónica Delgado
Generally in western, as a male territory, best friends become rivals. Either because they fight for money, women or family quarrels. This is the case, for example, in George Seaton’s Showdown (1973), where Dean Martin and Rock Hudson end up becoming enemies, since one becomes a sheriff and the other a villain; plus they fall in love with the same woman.
By Mónica Delgado
The film opens with a map of past times. The sea will be the character and element which orders and reorders the world, where a man will enter its waters, only to return to the land a series of lost bodies. Lúa vermella is a film where the sea is also a ghostly being, that frightens and feeds, shelters and repels, but above else, an entity whose matter could embody in its fury or depths, some passages of the characters of a town in their fight against the inevitable.
By Mónica Delgado
In certain performances by Ojoboca (a duo formed by Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy), a certain motif is recognized which appears in some of their short films: the urgency of fables or the construction of fictitious tales, but supported in scientific or historic arguments.
By Mónica Delgado
Young Slovakian filmmaker Viera Cákanyová poses in Frem (Czech Republic, Slovakia, 2019), a different approach to the representation of territories almost devoid of human presence. In time where the resource of the drone is synonym of postcard-type shots or advertising kind-of-material, a film like this poses itself as an exploration of everything that the dispositive implies as an experimentation tool.
By Mónica Delgado
Some years ago, Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu gave an acting workshop at Les Chantiers Nomades center in Toulouse, where the actors and actresses had to work based in the book Three Dialogues and the Tale of the Antichrist, from the philosopher, theologian and Russian writer Vladimir Soloviev.
Directors:
Mónica Delgado Ch.
José Sarmiento Hinojosa
ISSN 2311-7451
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