Film Festival Reports – Page 6

Film Festival Reports

LOCARNO 2021: A MÁQUINA INFERNAL BY FRANCIS VOGNER DOS REIS

By Mónica Delgado

A Maquina Infernal (The Infernal Machine) is the directorial debut of the Brazilian film critic and programmer Francis Vogner Dos Reis. It is also one of the few Latin American shorts seen in this 74th edition of the Locarno Film Festival. Although Vogner has experience as a screenwriter, producer and even actor in some independent Brazilian films (he was a screenwriter for Jogo das Decapitações (2013), by Sergio Bianchi; O Último Trago (2016), by Pedro Diógenes, Luiz Pretti and Ricardo Pretti; and Os Sonâmbulos (2018), by Tiago Mata Machado), this is a first foray into direction that allows us to know what those affiliations or motivations are, here associated with codes of genre cinema (the most conceptual horror cinema), bundled to a social critique from an automated working-class world. The thing is, Vogner comes off fine.

2021.08.07

Film Festival Reports

LOCARNO 2021: ATLAS BY NICCOLÒ CASTELLI

By Mónica Delgado

Atlas is the second feature film by Italian filmmaker Niccolò Castelli, and it concentrates all its structure on bringing to life the portrait of Allegra, a young woman who has suffered the loss of her boyfriend and some nearby friends during a terrorist attack. The film is constructed in such a way, due to the use of various flashbacks, that guilt, trauma and mourning join suspicion, mistrust and a xenophobic stance from the main character, prejudices that are gradually being cleared.

2021.08.06

Film Festival Reports

LOCARNO 2021: HEAVENS ABOVE (NEBESA) BY SRDAN DRAGOJEVIC

By Mónica Delgado

Serbian filmmaker Srdan Dragojevic returns to Nebesa to talk about another side of the Balkan conflict, from satire and comedy, and sometimes from the grotesque. From three parts, one in 1993, another in 2001, and a third in 2016, he composes a fresco through time on the crisis of Christian religion, as well as a great narrative axis to achieve a political critique on the ecclesiastical institutionality.

2021.08.06

Film Festival Reports

LOCARNO 2021: MAD GOD BY PHIL TIPPETT

By Mónica Delgado

We are facing a work of epic nature in every sense. It took Phil Tippett thirty years to materialize this almost hour and a half of purgatory, dystopian nightmare, putrid fantasy made of flesh and impossible alchemy. Presented out of competition at the recent Locarno film festival, Mad God (2021) fulfills a long dream in stop motion and becomes the “garden of delights” of the 21st century in steamgoth and, above all, steampunk.

2021.08.05

Cannes

CANNES – QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS 2021: TRAIN AGAIN BY PETER TSCHERKASSKY

By José Sarmiento

Peter Tscherkassky’s latest masterpiece Train Again (2021) is a magnificent work of synthesis: of the history of cinema, of cinema as a spectacle, of the anxiety of industrialization, of the unveiling of cinema apparatus, of the possibilities and expansion of structural cinema. Dedicated to his good friend and structural filmmaker extraordinaire, Kurt Kren, Tscherkassky shares the same impulses of the work he’s homaging.

2021.07.21

Cannes

CANNES – QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS 2021: EL EMPLEADO Y EL PATRÓN BY MANUEL NIETO ZAS

By Mónica Delgado

As part of the Latin American premieres in this edition of the 74th Cannes Film Festival, El Empleado y el Patrón (The Employee and the Boss), by Uruguayan filmmaker Manuel Nieto Zas, appears in the selection of feature lengths at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs. Nieto Zas returns after a “silence” of eight years, after making El lugar del hijo (2013), a film with great affinity with this new work, since both pose male relationships, from absences and presence of family ties, and from the rural life in the north of the country.

2021.07.19

Cannes

CANNES – QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS 2021: ÎNTREGALDE BY RADU MUNTEAN

By Mónica Delgado

The old premise of getting lost in the woods, addressed in cinema specially in the fantasy genre, is transformed by the gaze of the Romanian Radu Muntean into an opportunity to test a group of urban characters confronting a rural world anchored in time. In Întregalde (2021), a convoy of 4 x 4 and other off-road trucks from Bucharest ride in an humanitarian or charitable work trip through some villages in the most remote areas of Transylvania. What begins as a rewarding activity between middle-class families and friends carrying bags of canned food, turns into a nightmare when one of these three-member’s cars (played by Maria Popistasu, Ilona Brezoianu and Alex Bogdan) is left behind, stuck in the mud due to some wrong directions given by a local.

2021.07.19

Film Festival Reports

OBERHAUSEN 2021: SON CHANT BY VIVIAN OSTROVSKY

By Mónica Delgado

A few days ago the 67th edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen culminated, which was held in a dual edition, and whose programming covered several recent short films, some of them experimental. Among them, I highlight the recent work Son Chant (2020) by the American filmmaker and curator Vivian Ostrovsky, who was born in New York, grew up in Rio de Janeiro and currently resides in Paris.

2021.05.19

desistfilm

OBERHAUSEN: ABOUT SHORT FILMS IEVA AND MEMORIES (MINNEN)

By Monica Delgado

Within the international competition of Oberhausen International Festival, I was able to watch two remarkable short films, which from their particularities ,address female characters in atypical situations, as constructions, that is, as imaginary designs of ideal prototypes , which are seen in the impossibility of a “must be”: the fiction Ieva, by filmmakers Vytautas Plukas and Domas Petronis, and the documentary Memories (Minnen) by Kristin Johannessen.

2021.05.15

Film Festival Reports

VISIONS DU RÉEL 2021: BELA BY PRANTIK BASU

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

The sinuous forms in the floor, carefully drawn by the women in Bela, create a wonderful pattern of contours. This movement, carefully paced and produced as a celebration, serves as a preparation for the Chhau, a local traditional mask folk dance in the town. In the first moments of Bela, we see the men of the town, preparing for the dance, their movement sinuous also create contours in the air, a strange electricity captured by Indian director Prantik Narayan Basu.

2021.05.03