Film Festival Reports

ROTTERDAM 2022: SPLENDID ISOLATION BY URSZULA ANTONIAK

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Urszula Antoniak switched her narrative methods in the mid 2010’s. After portraying deeply emotional and intimate narrative films like Nothing Personal (2009) and Code Blue (2011), she turned to a minimalistic style, vignette-driven method of portraying an emotional pathos between her characters, specially in Nude Area (2014), where her cinema was stripped bare of most of her usual elements to focus on particular emotional explorations with the image. And while the results of this switch were mixed, Antoniak seems to have found a middle ground with the recent Splendid Isolation (2021), premiered in IFFR 2022.

2022.01.27

Film Festival Reports

ROTTERDAM 2022: EAMI BY PAZ ENCINA

By Monica Delgado

After the October 2021’s of documentary Veladores, Paraguayan filmmaker Paz Encina quickly returns to the screens with a political fiction about the destruction of a community. Made possible with a series of international funds, EAMI (2022), which competes for the Tiger award, is an elegy on the disintegration of the native Ayoreo Totobiegosode people, who reside between the Paraguayan and Bolivian Chaco, and how Mennonite landowners intervene on their lands.

2022.01.27

Eng

GDYNIA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL – ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

By Irina Trocan

Although my first visit to Gdynia was a distant seven years ago – for the 2014 edition of the Polish Film Festival –, the largest film industry event in Poland has always left me feeling like a bit of an outsider, and I don’t mean this as a complaint. The country’s film production is much higher and more diverse than most of its East European neighbors, to the point where it is quite difficult even for Polish film critics to keep up with new releases – thus, the main competition of the Gdynia festival is a welcome selection.

2021.10.01

Film Festival Reports

LOCARNO 2021: FOU DE BASSAN BY YANN GONZALEZ

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Barely reaching the 4-minute mark, Fou de Bassin (2021) is a magnificent exercise of synthesis by queer cinema master Yann Gonzalez. It’s notable its presence as a project that started being a videoclip for the music by electro-dub duo Jita Sensation which turned into a short film: all the codes of the music video are present, more playfully than every, and recreating a lost arcade of lovers floating in a limbo of neon lights and the ever present, immanent atmosphere of eros.

2021.08.22

Film Festival Reports

LOCARNO 2021: GERDA AND LUZIFER

By Mónica Delgado

Gerda obtained recognition for her protagonist as best actress and Luzifer caused expectation because it arrived with the patronage of Ulrich Seidl. Both works of young filmmakers seen in the international competition of the Locarno festival, are in line with the type of films that attract the attention of some programmers, based on their stories, which could be considered as striking in these events: a teenager as pole dancer while studying and taking care of her mother during the day, or a strange and fanatic family that lives isolated from the world. Beyond the gimmicky synopses, we were faced with irregular films, which left us with some unease.

2021.08.16

Film Festival Reports

LOCARNO 2021: ESPÍRITU SAGRADO BY CHEMA GARCÍA IBARRA

By Mónica Delgado

We find in Espíritu sagrado (Sacred Spirit) a concretion of the visual and fictional universe that fascinates the Spanish filmmaker Chema García Ibarra. Codes of “folkloric” science fiction, of ufological and paranormal imaginary in an extravagant range, and ordinary beings alienated to a way of perceiving the world, which can be monstrous, but almost nobody wants to see. This time we are in the community of Elche, in the south of Spain, whose physiognomy refers very well to a village environment akin to vintage nostalgia which invites us to place ourselves in an imprecise, liminal period, where fantasies and beliefs become post-truths, certainties to be protected.

2021.08.13

Film Festival Reports

LOCARNO 2021: LA PLACE D’UNE AUTRE BY AURÉLIA GEORGES

By Mónica Delgado

This third feature film by French filmmaker Aurélia Georges draws on classic forms. Being the adaptation of a story by the English writer Wilkie Collins, published in 1873, La Place d’une autre maintains fidelity to the spirit and literary style, which seeks to establish distances and correspondences between social classes, and between the consequences of the economic crisis typical of contexts of war. However, the filmmaker sets the story many years later, in the middle of the First World War, which allows us to evade the Victorian era and places the drama in France.

2021.08.12

Film Festival Reports

LOCARNO 2021: THE CASE OF THE VANISHING GODS BY ROSS LIPMAN

By Monica Delgado

The Case of the Vanishing Gods is the new work of the filmmaker, archivist and film essayist Ross Lipman, which recovers the elements of fascination for the archive, reissue and essayistic reflection of his previous works. This time he makes it through a few episodes of a series called The Psycho ward, which is renamed differently for the purposes of the festival. But that is the least of it, what matters here is the way in which Lipman talks about the figure of the double, or the other, here embodied in the relationship of doll and ventriloquist through his constructions and imaginary in the cinema.

2021.08.10

Film Festival Reports

LOCARNO 2021: MIS HERMANOS SUEÑAN DESPIERTOS BY CLAUDIA HUAIQUIMILLA

By Mónica Delgado

Mis Hermanos Sueñan Despiertos (My brothers dream awake), the second feature film by Chilean filmmaker Claudia Huaiquimilla, is a fiction inspired by real events that happened inside a juvenile detention center. It is the story of two teenage brothers who live there with other young people waiting for their freedom. In this sense, it is a learning film, but as the director puts it, even more towards the end, it is also a denunciation film, which seeks to generate empathy with the victims of this type of reconversion and punitive policies .

2021.08.09

Film Festival Reports

LOCARNO 2018: AL NAHER AND SOUL OF A BEAST

By Mónica Delgado

These two feature films presented in the international competition section of the Locarno festival, in its 2021 edition, are like two opposite poles. On the one hand, they reflect the eclectic spirit of the selection, which wants to reveal itself as a panorama of works of diverse descent and intention, also taking into account that there is a new director -Giona A. Nazzaro- who wants to give a particular touch to her management. And on the other, these are two experiences that could also illustrate two trends in some festivals today.

2021.08.08

desistfilm

ROTTERDAM 2022: SPLENDID ISOLATION BY URSZULA ANTONIAK

ROTTERDAM 2022: EAMI BY PAZ ENCINA

GDYNIA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL – ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

LOCARNO 2021: FOU DE BASSAN BY YANN GONZALEZ

LOCARNO 2021: GERDA AND LUZIFER

LOCARNO 2021: ESPÍRITU SAGRADO BY CHEMA GARCÍA IBARRA

LOCARNO 2021: LA PLACE D’UNE AUTRE BY AURÉLIA GEORGES

LOCARNO 2021: THE CASE OF THE VANISHING GODS BY ROSS LIPMAN

LOCARNO 2021: MIS HERMANOS SUEÑAN DESPIERTOS BY CLAUDIA HUAIQUIMILLA

LOCARNO 2018: AL NAHER AND SOUL OF A BEAST

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