Film Festival Reports

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS. ALIENS BY LUIS LOPEZ CARRASCO

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Questions apart, Aliens stays as an invaluable document and magnificent documentary about one of the most characteristic figures of the eighties in Madrid, and about this decade, its figures (Almodovar, Zulueta, Berlanga, nobody escapes the memory of Tesa) and this necessity of López Carrasco to construct new narratives from Spain’s contemporary history. Is a fantastic endeavor that wants to rescue the fundamental discourses of a generation that is “now in power, trying to manipulate and control any dissident discourse”. This articulation of the personal portrait and the testimony of the social array, is what makes the Spanish filmmaker so special. A VHS treat in 2017.

2017.09.12

Film Festival Reports

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS. WASTELAND N°1: ARDENT, VERDANT BY JODIE MACK

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Ardent, Verdant, (Burning green) is a proper title for Jodie Mack’s latest exploration in the structural games of textures, patterns and colorful images that carry an unsuspected depth. This playful way in which Mack orders her personal structure of objects can be misleadingly deceitful, although in the best of ways: there’s always something to reflect on this intense game of materials which is the filmmakers way of speaking of the optical arrest that the everyday object can bring to life, and the underlying reflection on the origins of the same object and what does it speaks for.

2017.09.11

Film Festival Reports

TIFF 2017. WAVELENGHTS: THE WATCHMEN BY FERN SILVA

By Mónica Delgado

With a world premiere in Rotterdam Film Festival and a Canadian premiere in Wavelenghts, Fern’s Silva The Watchmen is a revisitation on the concept of the panoptic from its vestiges and interactions with new dispositives of social surveillance. If the Jeremy Bentham invention is recovered here from some abandoned architectural ruins, which give an idea of the failure of methods of control and power, the question of feeling surveilled and repressed by an omnipresent being seem to be a conceptual motivation that the filmmaker uses in this short film.

2017.09.11

Film Festival Reports

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS. CANIBA BY LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR AND VERENA PARAVEL

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

As someone who knows the story of Issei Sagawa (a Japanese cannibal who killed and ate his classmate Renée Hartevelt, and was subsequently released by reasons of insanity), revisiting the almost mythical tale yet again trough the lenses of Castaing-Taylor and Paravel (the duo behind the extraordinary Leviathan) is something of a release valve, a cathartic experience into the intimate realm of one of mankind mos peculiar and disturbing characters, but also a lesson on humanity, on perception and listening

2017.09.10

Film Festival Reports

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS. (100) FT BY MINJUNG KIM AND HEART OF A MOUNTAIN BY PARASTOO ANOUSHAHPOUR, RYAN FERKO AND FARAZ ANOUSHAHPOUR

by Ivonne Sheen

In the section Wavelengths 3: figures in the landscapes, one can find two shortfalls which portrays a sort of Inner Landscape. This is to say, subjective experiences that find their appearances in the evocative power of a landscape. (100) ft by Minding Kim and Heart of a Mountain by Parastoo Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko and Faraz Anoushahpour, are cinematic Inner Landscapes that go deeper into images’ nature, instead of going wider. A exploration that comes from the inside and returns to it.

2017.09.08

Film Festival Reports

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS PALMERSTON BLVD. BY DAN BROWNE & FIRE BY LUCY PARKER

By Morella Moret

Wind and fire, nature and plasticity are the characters that play in this film that in less than six minutes show us different ways to conceive fire in our lives. The light, the wood, the electricity are ways that reflect on fire as one of the elements of nature, which are created thanks to the human being.

2017.09.08

Film Festival Reports

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS 2017. TA PEAU SI LISSE BY DENIS CÔTÉ

By Aldo Padilla

How are the standards of male beauty defined? Surely, there are several preconceptions in the collective mind about this point, although with a certain tendency, firmness is one of the common factors. Bodybuilding takes to the extreme this idea, the art of sculpting every muscle, muscles that the ordinary man barely looks at, highlighting those proportions by means of a strange wrapper-like shine. Pale skin does not shine, that is why the evident tanning of these characters in search for the right color happens: an artificial skin, hydrophobic and smooth as if it were a new car.

2017.09.08

Film Festival Reports

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS. BROWN AND CLEAR, BY KEVIN JEROME EVERSON

By Mónica Delgado

In Brown and Clear (2017), Kevin Jerome Everson turns again to a minimalistic style, a register that finds a support in grain and closeness as an ideal way to deepen in the details of the quotidian. Little by little, from actions that could be seen as laughable from simple sight, constructs complex significates about the workplace and the social, looking to achieve, from simplicity of resources, a whole mechanism to auscultate a hidden America.

2017.09.07

Film Festival Reports

MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2017: PIONEERING WOMEN AND GETTING THE HELL OUT OF THERE

By Tara Judah

At this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, the programme that first caught my eye, and that continues to win me over with its intelligent and entertaining questions around gender and identity, is Pioneering Women. Presented in association with the National Film and Sound Archive and co-curated by critic and broadcaster Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, the programme’s intent was to shine a light on, “amazing and sometimes under-seen Australian should-be classics directed by women and made in the 1980s and early 1990s.

2017.09.01

Film Festival Reports

LOCARNO 2017: DEFYING THE ARCHETYPAL MOTHER

by Andreea Patru

Some films from this year’s Locarno Film Festival deal with motherhood on different levels, like an adjustment to a new lifestyle as it happens in Milla (d. Valerie Massadian), or as the condition of being a mother seems to have sucked the life out of a woman as in Scary Mother (d. Ana Urushadze) and Freiheit (d. Jan Speckenbach). All the three films have in common a feminist approach that questions the Victorian ideas of motherhood as the heart of a balanced domestic life, nurturing their families without concern for their own needs or desires.

2017.08.16

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TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS. ALIENS BY LUIS LOPEZ CARRASCO

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS. WASTELAND N°1: ARDENT, VERDANT BY JODIE MACK

TIFF 2017. WAVELENGHTS: THE WATCHMEN BY FERN SILVA

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS. CANIBA BY LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR AND VERENA PARAVEL

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS. (100) FT BY MINJUNG KIM AND HEART OF A MOUNTAIN BY PARASTOO ANOUSHAHPOUR, RYAN FERKO AND FARAZ ANOUSHAHPOUR

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS PALMERSTON BLVD. BY DAN BROWNE & FIRE BY LUCY PARKER

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS 2017. TA PEAU SI LISSE BY DENIS CÔTÉ

TIFF 2017: WAVELENGTHS. BROWN AND CLEAR, BY KEVIN JEROME EVERSON

MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2017: PIONEERING WOMEN AND GETTING THE HELL OUT OF THERE

LOCARNO 2017: DEFYING THE ARCHETYPAL MOTHER

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