by Nicholas Vroman
Fauna, second feature film by Pau Faus, opens with opening shots of an Arcadian landscape, a few classic nature doc scenes – a heron, some ducks – then on to a shot of tree branches, dappled by sunlight. Cut to Valerio, a shepherd and his dog Brisa taking a break in a sylvan glade. The sound of a bleating lamb breaks the moment.
By Katy Montoya
At the Morelia Film Festival, Ximena Cuevas curated a program of short films by her long-time friend and collaborator Ricardo Nicolayevsky to pay homage to his decades-long body of work in light of his recent passing. The program began and ended with fragments of his short film “Impromptu” and included a selection of shorts he made of his friends and of himself between 1982 and 1985 during his time in New York City entitled “Lost Portraits.”
by Claudia Siefen-Leitich
One of my favourite works by Austrian sculptor and filmmaker Josef Dabernig is his transcription of the health guide Beauty and Digestion: Human Rejuvenation Through the Appropriate Maintenance of the Intestines by the Austrian medical doctor Franz Xaver Mayr, originally published in 1920. The human body is to be distrusted, especially one’s own.
By Nicholas Vroman
Helmut Dosantos’ Gods of Mexico (Dioses de Mexico, 2022) is a startlingly inventive ethnographic meditation on indigenous communities in Mexico. The film is divided into 3 sections – a fourth if you happen to be able to see the longer version at the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City (as explained in the interview).
By Katy Montoya
Many in this year’s selection of short films in the Umbrales section of FICUNAM 13 demonstrate different ways of conceiving the magnitude of destruction that defines our present moment. As seen in these pieces, our destruction— ours because we have no choice but to embrace it as part of us and our doing— insidiously infiltrates the most hidden nooks of our psyches as it seeps into the deepest reserves of our groundwater. But here, our responses to destruction can also find fresh roots. As Tsing asks, “How else can we account for the fact that anything is alive in the mess we have made?”
By Katy Montoya
Naomi Uman is known for her experimental and intervened in film like Removed and Hand-Eye Coordination. Her reflections on the gaze over women’s bodies don’t fall into a simplistic anti porn stance or reduce the desire to see women’s bodies to a masculine whim. Other segments of her work can be characterized by an impulse to reach out into the world that is accompanied intimately by an impulse to reach inward and make herself vulnerable.
Por José Sarmiento Hinojosa
Imaginar posibles futuros como acto de resistencia. Las ficciones especulativas como alternativas de pensamiento decolonial son una práctica bienvenida en la región en la última década, especialmente si pensamos en la obra que ha salido de estas iniciativas: filmes notables como Anhell69 de Theo Montoya (2022) o Mato Seco en Chamas de Adirley Queiróz y Joana Pimenta (2022) filmes que trabajan sobre la reconfiguración de lo simbólico, que imaginan líneas paralelas de tiempo en donde las resistencias se dan a través de “fantasmagorias eróticas” (Valentina Giraldo sobre Anhell69) o “arcadias perdidas” (como es el universo regido por mujeres de Mato Seco en Chamas.
By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
Configurar a que nos referimos con “apariciones” en el cine, nos demanda entrar a fondo sobre decenas de cuestiones que han habitado la memoria del mismo desde su invención. El cine, como influjo, como rito, como ceremonia, invoca a una aparición desde su propio inicio. Ese lure Barthesiano de la sala del cine nos prepara para una primera fantasmagoría, el contrato social en donde nos sometemos a la invocación de la imagen. En este última edición de Cinema Du Réel, me interesó sobremanera conjugar algunas formas de aparición en la pantalla, las cuales se suceden a partir de los filmes de James Benning, Deborah Stratman, Sharon Lockhart, Pablo Mazollo, Heinz Emigholz y Luke Fowler.
By Nicholas Vroman
Jorge Cuchí’s first feature film, 50 (or Two Whales Meet on the Beach) snagged a trifecta of awards at the 2021 Morelia International Film Festival – The Ojo Award for Best Mexican Feature Film along with Best Actress and Actor awards. A former advertising industry maven, Cuchí, unenthused by a future promoting products, turned to his first love, cinema, to create stories and engage in issues that had much more importance to him.
by Claudia Siefen-Leitich
The love, or simply the affinity, for analogue cinema is still easy to describe: working with analogue film never ends, it even continues during every projection. You hear the sounds coming out oft he projection room, watching the reel change marks on screen when it comes to a 35mm print, or you experience a projection of 8mm or Super 8, the projectors installed right in the middle of the audience!
Directors:
Mónica Delgado Ch.
José Sarmiento Hinojosa
ISSN 2311-7451
© Desistfilm 2020
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