Film Festival Reports

Cannes

CANNES 2014: PARTY GIRL BY MARIE AMACHOUKELI, CLAIRE BURGER AND SAMUEL THEIS

By Mónica Delgado

Three debutant filmmakers come together to extend the life on the big screen of Angélique Litzenburger, a 60 year old ex-nightclub dancer, who finds herself in the dilemma of keeping a lifestyle or changing it for a marriage proposal from one of her clients. Party Girl sets all its dramatic weight in the especial figure of Angélique, a real John-Wateresque character, that assumes in fiction a re-representation of herself, and to spread a little of that fresh and jolly way of her nocturne rutine.

READ MORE »
Cannes

CANNES 2014. DARKER THAN MIDNIGHT BY SEBASTIANO RISO

By Mónica Delgado

We’re in the eighties, and the film opening talks about a pubescent kid, of red curls that seems very much like Tadzio of Visconti’s Death on Venice, and who appears singing under the influence of his inspiration figures: David Bowie, Lou Reed and other icons of rock in posters glued to the wall of his secret corner.

READ MORE »
Cannes

CANNES 2014: TIMBUKTU BY ABDERAHMNE SISSAKO

By Mónica Delgado

Getting away somewhat from the slope of African cinema in the style of Ousmane Sembene, appealing less to the ritual matter or social aspect between hierarchies in a same community, Timbuktu explores the invasion of the Islamic police in a little town of the deserts of Mauritania, in an abrupt cultural and moral clash that is narrated with a keen and denouncing eye.

READ MORE »
Cannes

CANNES 2014: GRACE OF MONACO BY OLIVIER DAHAN

By Mónica Delgado

First day at Cannes and all seems in order. All press gathered in expectation for the new film of Olivier Dahan. As it happened before for La Vie en Rose, the biopic of Edith Piaf, the filmmaker takes passages of the life of famous characters with an evident preoccupation of seasoning them with some vague detail of the official biography.

READ MORE »
BAFICI

BAFICI 2014: THE WAIT BY M.BLASH

by José Sarmiento Hinojosa

“Trippy”, “beautiful” “gorgeously photographed”, shouldn’t be the standards with which we judge a film. And there seems to be a stream of independent american films lately that are setting all their efforts in creating a pseudo spirituality, kind of a “low brow metaphysics” inside their films (…)

READ MORE »
BAFICI

BAFICI 2014: ENCOUNTERS WITH YOUR INNER TROTSKY CHILD BY JIM FINN

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Jim Finn seems to get pleasure in the aesthetics of video, and the possibilities of recreation of alternative realities this format can provide him. With his mockumentary, La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (2007), he recalled the terrorist movement Sendero Luminoso and its movements inside the Peruvian prison system, and how the prisons served as headquarters for the prisoners, organizing parades and spreading the maoist ideology of the movement.

READ MORE »