Film Festival Reports

Berlinale

BERLINALE 2022: UN AÑO, UNA NOCHE BY ISAKI LACUESTA

By Monica Delgado

Un Año, Una Noche (One Year, One Night, 2021) , premiered in the competition for the Golden Bear at the 72nd Berlinale, is a film about trauma and the impossibility of overcoming tragic events from a psychological point of view. Moreover, it seems appropriate that the adaptation of a non-fiction book about a survivor of the attack on the Bataclan club in Paris in 2015 fell into the hands of the Spanish filmmaker Isaki Lacuesta, since although the film describes the horror during this assault, it focuses more on the consequences of this event in the relationship of a young couple, played by the Argentine actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and the French actress Noémie Merlant.

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Berlinale

BERLINALE 2022: EVERYTHING WILL BE OK BY RITHY PANH

By Monica Delgado

Presented in the international competition of the 72nd Berlinale, Everything Will Be Ok, by the Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh, is an activist statement against everything that makes up the destruction of the world: totalitarianism, genocide, exploitation, cruelty, subjugation, decadence, in a great cocktail visual, typical of the reflective essay film, and in this case with a particular political agenda.

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Berlinale

BERLINALE 2022: AVEC AMOUR ET ACHARNEMENT BY CLAIRE DENIS

By Monica Delgado

All the elements of Avec amour et acharnement belong to the previous universe of Claire Denis. In this adaptation of a novel by the French writer Christine Angot, made in tandem with Denis herself in the script, unusual meanings about love appear, as well as forms of genre cinema, fetish actors, and a dramatic imprint around the rupture of the idyll. Presented in the official competition of the 72nd Berlin Film Festival, this new feature film by Denis is a stupendous work about the figure of the intruder, and about suspicion, a necessary input to narrate a love story seen a thousand times, but here under the influence creative and innovative of Denis.

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Berlinale

BERLINALE 2022: FLUX GOURMET, BY PETER STRICKLAND

By Monica Delgado

Peter Strickland’s fifth feature film is a satire on the world of artists in residence. Following the style of The Duke of Burgundy (2014), his episode in The Field Guide To Evil (2018) or In Fabric (2018), in Flux Gourmet (2022) exposes a fabled setting, with delicate, glamorous characters, but who they never cease to be bizarre or grandiloquent, to tell a story about impact performances.

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Berlinale

BERLINALE 2022: RIMINI, BY ULRICH SEIDL

By Monica Delgado

With more than twenty films, between documentaries and fiction, the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl arrived at the 72nd edition of the Berlinale. Rimini’s premiere is part of the official competition, and although it takes the name of a city that is not indifferent to any movie buff (the birthplace of Federico Fellini), it is a portrait of an autumn character, crossed by a context political and social, as is often the case in much of this filmmaker’s cinema.

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Berlinale

BERLINALE 2022: VIENS JE T’EMMÈNE (NOBODY’S HERO) BY ALAIN GUIRAUDIE

By Monica Delgado

The 72nd edition of the Berlin International Film Festival began in person against all odds. And a good symptom of the program’s commitment were the films selected for the initial date, such as the world premiere of the recent work by French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie, the comedy Nobody’s Hero (Viens je t’emmène).

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Film Festival Reports

ROTTERDAM 2022: SEVEN DAYS EVERY WEEK OR FILM AS A FREE VERSE

By Milan Cyron
Translated from Czech by Tomáš Hudák.

In the 1960s, works of the Czechoslovak New Wave were regularly awarded in Cannes, Venice, Bergamo, Sorrento, Locarno, Mannheim, or Oberhausen while film critics praised directors such as Miloš Forman, Vera Chytilová, Jaromil Jires, or Hynek Bocan. However, these Czech filmmakers somewhat overshadowed their Slovak companions, including arguably the most famous one, Juraj Jakubisko, whose second feature, Deserters and Pilgrims (1968), was awarded at the Venice Film Festival.

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Film Festival Reports

ROTTERDAM 2022: EKOBIO BY ELKIN CALDERÓN GUEVARA AND DIEGO PIÑEROS GARCÍA

By Monica Delgado

Within the Short & Mid-length: Artists’ Moving Image section of the recent Rotterdam International Film Festival, you can see EKOBIO, a Colombian short film by the artists’ collective formed by Elkin Calderón Guevara and Diego Piñeros García, which is the result of a multimedia project which is based on the texts of the Afro writer and researcher Manuel Zapata Olivella, who died in 2004.

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Film Festival Reports

ROTTERDAM 2022: AMMODO TIGER SHORT COMPETITION PT. 1

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

The Ammodo Tiger Competition, a run of mid-length and short film program at IFFR, has focused its view in a particular experience of exploring new narratives in smaller formats. The experimental field in Rotterdam has been well represented with past winners such as Fox Maxy’s Maat Means Land (2020), Daïchi Saito’s Engram of Returning (2015), Observando el Cielo by Jeanne Liotta (2007)  or Dorian Jespers’ Sun Dog (2019), among many others. While we explore this first part of Ammodo’s competition, we began to find certain hidden surprises and other returning favorites.

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