Film Festival Reports

Cannes

CANNES 2022: BOY FROM HEAVEN BY TARIK SALEH

By Monica Delgado

This is a film about some events in Egypt, but it is not produced by that country. Made with capitals from Sweden, Finland and Denmark, Boy from Heaven, the fifth feature film by the Swedish filmmaker, of Egyptian descent, Tarik Saleh is a political thriller about a young son of a provincial fisherman who, thanks to a scholarship, enters the theological university of Al-Azhar in Cairo, where boarding students are trained to be mediators of Sunni Islam. After his admission and acclimatization to the new life, Adam is tangentially affected by the death of the Great Imam, who runs the institution, and with it he will be immersed in a network of conspirators for religious power, which is equal to political power in that country.

READ MORE »
Cannes

CANNES 2022: TCHAIKOVSKY’S WIFE BY KIRILL SEREBRENNIKOV

By Monica Delgado

We are already in the sixth day of the Cannes festival and the film Tchaikovsky’s Wife, by Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov, already looks very old in the course of it. On the one hand, because of the way the filmmaker takes to extrapolate a historical drama to the screen in relation to other films seen these days, and on the other, because of a certain decadent look, even more so towards the end of the film, which at this point heights looks outdated and very, paradoxically, of qualité.

READ MORE »
Cannes

CANNES 2022: WAR PONY BY RILEY KEOUGH AND GINA GAMMEL

By Monica Delgado

After a few days in this 75th edition of the Cannes Festival, it has been difficult to find a well-rounded film (such as Scarlet by Pietro Marcello, seen in the Directors’ Fortnight, which we will write about soon). Although War Pony, the first feature film by actress Riley Keough and producer Gina Gammell and presented in the official section Un Certain Regard, is not a successful film, it contains a look that is followed with considerable interest, around a couple of characters in work and family crisis; a teenager and a young man who live in Pine Ridge, a territory of South Dakota. Both characters, who do not know each other, make up the two narrative lines that the directors choose to show the portrait of a community, perhaps marked by commonplaces, such as drug trafficking, poverty and social exclusion. Although, the ‘coming of age’ touch and some decisions in the editing and staging mean that the result is not negligible.

READ MORE »
Film Festival Reports

OBERHAUSEN 2022: IT GREW FUR AGAIN, LOST IT, DEVELOPED SCALES, LOST THEM BY GITTE VILLESEN

By Monica Delgado

A short film with a suggestively long name was one of the most successful among those selected for the competition (along with the works of Los ingrávidos, Lior Shamriz, Jan Bujnowski and Dalibor Martinis, which I will comment on in other posts). It grew fur again, lost it, developed scales, lost them (2021), directed by the Danish artist Gotte Villesen, is an essay film that explores two imaginaries that emerged from two works of feminist science fiction.

READ MORE »
Film Festival Reports

OBERHAUSEN 2022: YAGÉ BY MARTÍN MOLINA GOLA

By Monica Delgado

A quote by William Burroughs is the prelude – or door – to the journey that the Mexican filmmaker and researcher Martín Molina Gola proposes in Yagé (2021), from a tense black and white, product of a negative treatment of digital video. The beatnik brand as a reflection for entering an Amazonian universe, perhaps a cliché option, or perhaps a tie with a poetic or worldview around the processes produced by yagué or ayahuasca.

READ MORE »
Film Festival Reports

OBERHAUSEN 2022: GYPSIES IN DUISBURG BY RAINER KOMERS

By Monica Delgado

A few days ago, the 68th edition of the Oberhausen Film Festival concluded, which featured around 600 short and medium-length films from more than 70 countries, 44 of them with viewing in some online sections. After the pandemic confinement, the festival continues to be a meeting place for curators, programmers, artists, filmmakers and the general public from various parts of the world, and also as a thermometer of current trends in the format.

READ MORE »
Cinéma du Réel

CINÉMA DU RÉEL 2022: ANYOX, URBAN SOLUTIONS

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Somehow this particular edition of Cinéma du Réel has made me feel as being trapped in the fauces of history. And history, it is something inescapable. It’s part of what we as humans are experiencing currently, history-in-the-making, as well as part of the aftermath of history. But the history that has been told throughout the more than 10 films I watched in the program suggests that there seems to be an urgency by the filmmakers or the programmers to situate us in this moment to both look back on the remains of the past, or to look under our feet to watch the passage of time and its terrible unavoidability unfold.

READ MORE »
Cinéma du Réel

CINÉMA DU RÉEL 2022: DEVIL’S PEAK, HORS-TITRE

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

On the other side of Cinéma du Reél’s program, the underlying subject of capitalism/neoliberalism and its related issues is also present, although presented through the lenses of two experimental filmmakers, who are filming from the perspective of the underlying poetry of historical events in a meta linguistic fashion (Hors-Titre), or furiously portraying the geography/psychology of a land in turmoil (Devil’s Peak) and its inherent complexities.

READ MORE »
Cinéma du Réel

CINÉMA DU RÉEL 2022: WE STUDENTS!, DOMY+AILUCHA: KET STUFF!

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

A subjacent theme seems to have permeated the program of the latest edition of Cinéma du Réel: somehow the preoccupations on the effects of colonialism and capitalism and its aftermath seems to be manifesting deeply in the different sections of the festival. Arguably, not all the films in the programs address this issue head-on, but the latent marks of these particular elements in former colonized lands, and the situation in the different territories that are now within the geography post-pandemic/neoliberalist/late-stage capitalism countries, “late-developed” and “first world” ones, appear to be more tangible than ever. There is a necessity to address these stories, because behind this whole conglomerate of history-made-scar lies real human beings, attempting to somehow navigate the waters of the world they’ve received. 

READ MORE »
Berlinale

BERLINALE 2022: GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE BY JACQUELYNE MILLS

By Monica Delgado

Geographies of Solitude is the debut feature film by Canadian Jacquelyn Mills and is a different and auspicious experience in the documentary treatment and in the approach to its protagonist, the conservationist, activist and naturalist Zoe Lucas, who has lived since the seventies on an island lonely, Sable Island. The filmmaker’s gaze on her character allows us to value the committed dimension of Lucas in the study of the fauna and flora of the area and in his fight against the plastic waste that ends up in the confines of the island. And Mills does not stay in the convention, but she explores from the diversity of textures, exposures and montage that 16mm allows.

READ MORE »