Film Festival Reports
ROTTERDAM 2022: AMMODO TIGER COMPETITION (PT. II)
By José Sarmiento Hinojosa Last week, the winners of Ammodo Tiger Competition were announced at IFFR 2022. And while my “to watch” list included the
2022.02.07
Film Festival Reports
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.
2022.02.02
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.
2022.01.31
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
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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