Film Festival Reports

Film Festival Reports

MEDIA CITY FILM FESTIVAL 2017: JENNIFER SAPARZADEH, KEVIN JEROME EVERSON, SAUL LEVINE

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

It’s difficult not to feel shaken by the images of red flowers fenced by metal barb wires in Jennifer Saparzadeh’s last film Nu Dem. The transient feel of communities fleeing home through the Balkan Route is an image cinema has not been unaware of, but the nakedness of everyday coexistence, of a mass of humanity trying to reach Western Europe to survive, unaware if freedom or rejection awaits them, it’s specially disturbing in this kind of diary-film.

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Film Festival Reports

MEDIA CITY FILM FESTIVAL 2017: DAÏCHI SAÏTO, ANA VAZ, PABLO MAZZOLO, FRIEDL KUBELKA

by José Sarmiento-Hinojosa

Proof of the outstanding reach of the Media City Film Festival in Detroit, is the remarkable variety of styles in contemporary experimental cinema, a feat that is possible via the efforts of an outstanding team, headed by Oona Mosna, which has attempted and achieved a fine selection in this edition of 2017. Following are a group of texts devoted to share a glimpse of what expanded cinema has to offer today in the 22th edition of the MC. 

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Film Festival Reports

MUTA 2017: POTAMKIN BY STEPHEN BROOMER

By Ivonne Sheen

In Potamkin, a mass of spectators react and turn their heads from side to side. They appear as a reminder of the past of those images we are watching and of their purpose. Thinking of film as a device of social change, set questions about the rol of the spectators, the filmmakers and the film critics.

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Film Festival Reports

MUTA 2017: DALIBOR BARIC FOCUS

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Dalibor Baric’s experimental animation cinema Works as a specters’ compartment: faceless creatures at the margin of the representation of reality, figures recreated by the process of découpé (or decollage, as mentioned by Antoni Pinent in his visit to Lima), manifestations of this “fetishization” of the uncanny valley1. Since Spectres of Veronica (2011) to The Horror of Dracula (2010), these characters make the visual interpretation restless; displace the comfort of the habitual to transform themselves in new meanings, new readings, new points of departure.

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Film Festival Reports

MUTA 2017: PETER LICHTER FOCUS

By Mónica Delgado

In less of ten years of work, Lichter has shown versatility and a longing for the experimentation of different forms of appropriation, especially from the Super 8, achieving the materialization of personal universes that traverse the premises of some finished objects to transform them in new ways of showing the intimate or the familiar.

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Film Festival Reports

MUTA 2017: ANTONI PINENT PROGRAM

By Mónica Delgado

Something that is clear after watching Pinent’s cinema in panoramic view, is his fortunate perseverance in the experimentation of different editing techniques, not only from the appropriation, but also the subversion of the discourses from the materiality that celluloid allows in its diverse formats, from Super 8 to 35mm, or from video in Betacam. A cinema that comes from old and known things, which are transformed in Pinent’s hands to become vital and powerful.

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Film Festival Reports

IL CINEMA RITROVATO 2017: THE ART OF DECAY, THE PERSISTENCE OF FILM

By Tara Judah

Introducing Decasia (2002) at Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bill Morrison talked about his requests for access for use of decaying nitrate film. Not all archives were forthcoming with the material. Perhaps it is the persistence of imperfection that breeds protective behaviour in archivists. But, what Morrison affected, once access was granted, is a glorious symphony of the persistence of history.

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Film Festival Reports

IL CINEMA RITROVATO 2017: FISHING FOR GOD

By Tara Judah

The most memorable movies aren’t always the best, but there’s something about an earnest stinker that can make the heart swell. Featured in the festival’s Universal Pictures: the Laemmle Junior Years strand, Tay Garnett’s Destination Unknown (1933) is this year’s knock-out rediscovery.

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