
DESISTFILM ROUND-UP: BEST OF 2020/ LO MEJOR DEL 2020
After counting all the votes from our different friends, staff and collaborators from around the world, these are the best films of 2020:
After counting all the votes from our different friends, staff and collaborators from around the world, these are the best films of 2020:
2020 comes to an end, and with it, a great twist of the screw that seems to return the world to a primitive state, to recognize its own fragility and the precariousness of an economic / social system that falls like a house of cards. In the midst of chaos, at home, we take refuge in the light pulses of the cinema, in the rhythmic variations, in the echo of the sounds of our televisions, computers, screens. This is the record of a cinephilia that resists, that remains and reinvents itself. Within the chaos, the light of the cinema continues to shine on us.
by Claudia Siefen-Leitich
How it is all about rhythm and how the austrian film director Reinhard Jud braught us that very special one with his doucmentary film about the american writer James Ellroy.
By Paddy Mulholland
In the spirit of the later turning point of 1998, in that near-comically optimistic decade for the West, the narrative shifted momentously and purposefully. All efforts were put toward ending the conflict – bygones had to be bygones now, forgiveness had to be no longer sought but unconditionally proffered, the buzzword became “reconciliation.”
By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
Two 2020 films I saw which were decidedly different from one another but shared a common element that made them exceptionally good and drove me to write a piece about them (in this series of impossible dialogues between films I am planning to do) were the dance/coreography documentary Shelly Belly Inna Real Life by Argentinian filmmaker, dancer and choreographer Cecilia Bengolea and 80,000 ans, a dreamlike split screen film by Christelle Lheureux.
By Joe Miller
The James Stanley Brakhage Collection at the University of Colorado Libraries offers researchers a spectacular opening scene; seven folders into Box 1, the files of his correspondence with Kenneth Anger begin, and they continue far into box two – dozens of fat folders stuffed with densely typed letters and handwritten notes spanning 30 years of friendship, much of it on Anger’s cool pentagram or pyramid-and-flying-saucer stationary.
By Paddy Mulholland
The slow death, the anguished stagger of a wounded labourer in Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004), the gradual, forced mental disintegration of a sex slave in Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012), is not in Lav Diaz’s latest, Genus, Pan. (2020). Noted as one of the Filipino filmmaker’s shortest features to date, it’s also one of his most direct, most confrontational, least overtly compassionate.
by Claudia Siefen-Leitich
Doesn’t the modern, enlightened observer, who feels isolated in his existence, have the tendency to look for information in the form of a work of art? The observer approaches the work of art in the hope of adding a small, universal insight to his or her own endeavour, to make sure of himself or herself with the help of the truth. With this expectation, one approaches in particular the image produced and the running image is included here. Film, painting and sculpture as material reality, which can be experienced directly by the viewer through the senses and thus generates truth.
During this pandemic season, french filmmaker and plastic artist Marylène Negro has made her films available at: http://www.tousdesindiens.com/marylene_negro.
We rescued this wonderful text by Nicole Brenez for the occasion, about Marylène’s masterpiece “X+”
We’re honoured to premiere online the new Jacques Perconte film, Avant L’effondrement Du Mont Blanc (Before the collapse of Mont Blanc, 2020). Accompanying the film, is a text by José Sarmiento Hinojosa, both in English and Spanish, below.
Estamos honrados de estrenar online el nuevo filme de Jacques Perconte, Avant L’effondrement Du Mont Blanc (Antes del colapso del Mont Blanc, 2020). Acompaña el filme un texto de José Sarmiento Hinojosa, en inglés y español, debajo.
Directors:
Mónica Delgado Ch.
José Sarmiento Hinojosa
ISSN 2311-7451
© Desistfilm 2020
Lima Perú. All rights reserved.