Film Festival Reports

Cinéma du Réel

CINÉMA DU RÉEL: FIGURE MINUS FACT BY MARY HELENA CLARK

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

“Don’t talk unless you  can’t improve the silence”

Before anything, the seemingly fleeting and unconnected images of Mary Helena Clark’s Figure Minus Fact (2020) speak of a great convergence. It’s a convergence of dialectical knowledge, through inherent contingency of images from the apparatus of life, which opens with the mechanism of a bell as a great conveyor for beginning.

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Berlinale

BERLINALE 2021: THE INHERITANCE, TZAREVNA SCALING, JACK’S RIDE AND WHAT WILL BE OF SUMMER

By Monica Delgado

Some days have passed since the 71st edition of the Berlinale and some films remain as an echo. One of those is The Inheritance by the American Ephraim Asili, which we were able to see in the Forum section. This documentary materializes  the idea of ??ubuntu throughout its footage, a concept that refers to an order of community justice, protected by the traditions and thoughts of African people in their resistance to slavery and colonization.

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Berlinale

BERLINALE 2021: FILMS BY ANA VAZ, FERN SILVA, SOHRAB HURA AND KIM MINJUNG

By Monica Delgado

In this article I have grouped films seen in the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded and Encounters section, beyond their postulates, since although almost all are supported by premises, theses or concepts of a political or social nature; they explore various expressive options confronting presumptions or canons of the audiovisual language itself. Quoting Wallace Stevens or Hollis Frampton, tracing the spatial route between a volcanic eruption and stellar immensity or attending a lunar rite in the midst of the waves, they intertwine various creative outings with certain notion of déjà vu.

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Berlinale

BERLINALE 2021: BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN BY RADU JUDE

By Mónica Delgado

The domestic images of a sexual act are the raw material with which Romanian Radu Jude begins and builds a satire, understood here as a discourse that sharply and corrosively criticizes a system of habits and flaws, prejudices and common meanings, although not with a moralizing intention, but with a politically burlesque one.

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Berlinale

BERLINALE 2021: STE. ANNE BY RHAYNE VERMETTE

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

This idea finally gave materialized in Ste. Anne (2021), Rhayne’s first feature film and also her first venture into narrative experimental fiction. Though she has kept alive very much what is the essence of her experimental work, in Ste. Anne there’s an expansion to her methods, her primal interests on the idea of deconstruction, the ruin as a seminal element that triggers her creative process and her own vital relation with the materiality of film. This is manifested through a connection that is expanded:

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Berlinale

BERLINALE 2021: ON FILMS BY ALEXANDER KOBERIDZE AND CÉLINE SCIAMMA

By Mónica Delgado

Both Petite Maman, by the French Céline Sciamma, and What do we see when we look at the sky?, by the Georgian Alexandre Koberidze, allow us to measure a sensitivity from the programming of festivals in relation to the pandemic crisis, which in addition to being economic, is also emotional. Is it that, from now on, films that show more than the optimistic future of humanity will pour over us? Are now these films of guilt and tragedy or those of beautiful human warmth “necessary” films?

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Berlinale

BERLINALE 2021: INTRODUCTION BY HONG SANG-SOO

By Mónica Delgado

As in The Day After or On The Beach At Night Alone, Hong Sang-soo focuses her new account on certain questioning of representations of masculinity. Characters dejected by some conventions, who discuss common places or preconceived ideas about how they should act in certain situations. The film tells a few passages in the life of Youngho (Shin Seokho), a young acting student who gives up studying for love. This seems to be the central premise of a film, which, as often happens in the South Korean filmmaker’s cinema, is divided into parts and subject to some situations fragmented by huge ellipses or jumps in time.

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Berlinale

BERLINALE 2021: ABOUT FILMS BY AVI MOGRABI, ALICE DIOP AND ZHU SHENGZE

By Mónica Delgado

The shot that A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces (2021) opens with, refers to pandemic-ridden Wuhan. A “necessary” context to begin to describe the Chinese city most mentioned by the news throughout the past year. Sirens sounds, few people in the almost empty streets with masks, while security agents guard the quarantine. But, the intention of the filmmaker Zhu Shengze is not to take a look at this place in response to all the stereotypes and prejudices with xenophobic issues that also circulated in the media and networks.Military Occupation

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