Author: Rebecca

Libertarias / Freedom Fighters (Vicente Aranda, 1996)

On By RebeccaIn Spanish Cinema

10478_01

Big Picture Magazine‘s theme for January 2016 is ‘War’. Trying to think of a film that related to ‘war’ in an unusual way, Libertarias / Freedom Fighters (Vicente Aranda, 1996) came to mind – it is set during the Spanish Civil War and focuses on a group of left-wing, anarchist women who are fighting on the front line. I reviewed the film back in 2014 when the London Spanish Film Festival had a retrospective of Vicente Aranda’s work, and I was surprised by how much I liked it because I generally get a ‘flesh peddler’ vibe from a lot of Aranda’s films (caveat: I’ve mainly seen his films from the 1990s and later) but this was a labour of love for the director and a celebration of radical women and political sisterhood.

Anyway, the piece had to fit within one of the standard sections of their website so I had to decide what tack to take with the film. I knew that I wanted to spotlight its treatment of the women. I wouldn’t categorise it as a ‘Lost Classic’ – it is by no means perfect – so it has ended up as a ‘Brilliant Failure’. This category isn’t meant to classify films as disasters but to highlight those films that don’t quite reach greatness but still have plenty to recommend them. For me, the ‘brilliant’ aspect of Libertarias is the way that politically-committed women (who self-identify as feminists) are put front and centre – their relationships with each other do not become secondary to a romantic plot or other aspects of the narrative. The ‘failure’ (or the central flaw) is that the main protagonist (and audience proxy) – María (Ariadna Gil – who I usually like) – is a wet blanket and her subservience runs counter to what the rest of the women embody. But there are other issues with the film. For example, while I was taking screenshots to accompany the piece I got distracted by the camerawork and started to wonder why – when the film is shot in a widescreen format – Aranda often panned between characters rather than cutting shot/reverse shot or simply putting people in the same frame. I don’t have an answer at the moment. Plus, there’s also a sequence where Victoria Abril’s character is seemingly possessed by a spirit which just feels like it’s from an entirely different film. But it was the way that Gil’s character undermines other aspects of the film that particularly irritated me when I first watched it.

Re: screenshots. The image at the top of this post is a promo shot – you will see over at Big Picture Magazine that the image quality on the actual DVD that I have is not very good. I spotted yesterday that the film was reissued last year – as part of Divisa’s initiative to restore and reissue OOP Spanish films – so possibly there is now a better edition available but there is still no subtitled version. So I’m afraid that I’m recommending something that most of you won’t be able to watch.

Click through to Big Picture Magazine to read my piece – Brilliant Failure: Freedom Fighters (Vicente Aranda, 1996).

 

More Favourites of 2015: Old, but new to me

On By RebeccaIn Films

Essentially these are my favourite first-time viewings from this year that don’t fit within the 2014/2015 rule that I set for my main list. Some of them – Leviathan and Nostalgia de la luz – are films that I’ve finally caught up with (several years after everyone else), some – El ángel exterminador and Bodas de sangre – were films (that I should have already seen) watched as background viewing in relation to something else but that ended up capturing my attention, and others – Macario and Eden Valley – were part of retrospectives (the Focus on Mexico at EIFF and the ‘For Ever Amber‘ film and photography retro that took place at the Tyneside Cinema and Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle respectively (if the photography exhibition from the latter travels elsewhere, I highly recommend it – I visited it several times)). As ever, I also have quite a large pile of DVDs that I want to catch up with, and in terms of reissues of older films these include several of Second Run’s releases from the past year, El mundo sigue / Life Goes On (Fernando Fernán Gómez, 1965) [reissued in Spain for its 50th Anniversary], more of the Carlos Saura films (honest), plus – inspired by having almost physically walked straight into him while he was shooting his new film on Northumberland Street in Newcastle – I’ve also picked up several Ken Loach films (including Black Jack, Looks and Smiles and Fatherland) that I’ve not seen before.
But here are some of my older favourites watched during 2015…

Macario_2

(1) Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960)
[Review] I didn’t know anything about this one before seeing it at the Edinburgh Film Festival back in June but it ended up being my favourite screening of the festival. A cinematic version of magic realism, Gavaldón’s 18th century-set film manages to be fable-like but also surprisingly modern and funny. Gabriel Figueroa’s cinematography is beautiful and the image of a sea of candles representing the whole of humanity is one that I’ll remember for a very long time.

Taking of Pelham

(2) The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, 1974)
Another of the retrospective screenings at EIFF and my other main favourite from the festival. An obvious influence on many subsequent films (as well as being the source of Tarantino’s colourful pseudonyms in Reservoir Dogs) and genuinely edge-of-seat stuff in several key sequences. In Robert Shaw the film has a villain who is utterly committed to his cause and who has a cynical and clear-eyed view on how the authorities will respond. A few dead bodies along the way really doesn’t bother him, which creates a real sense of jeopardy for the nameless hostages – and the fact that we don’t know the real names of anyone on the train (hostage or hostage-taker) means that it’s difficult to gauge who will survive. It’s surprisingly funny (perhaps that should be expected with Walter Matthau in the lead role but it’s too violent to be a straightforward comedy) not least because of how humour is repeatedly used to undercut tension (when the action / standoff gets too nerve-wracking) or undermine pomposity (basically any scenes involving the Mayor). But it’s also used to show up some of Zachary Garber’s (Matthau) more boorish behaviour (as in the reveal that the Japanese visitors understand English perfectly – Garber has the grace to look embarrassed at that point). And Matthau is just perfect.

the-exterminating-angel

(3) El ángel exterminador / The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)
Yes, I should have seen this before now. I will make an effort to fill in some of the other gaps (or, more accurately, yawning chasms) in my Buñuel viewings in the coming year.

Bodas de sangre

(4) Bodas de sangre / Blood Wedding (Carlos Saura, 1981)
I watched this (without taking notes, which is why I didn’t write it up as part of the Carlos Saura Challenge) because I thought that I would manage to see La Novia (Paula Ortiz, 2015) in Gijón and they’re based on the same Lorca play. Short version: I didn’t see Ortiz’s film. Longer version: I was very taken with Saura’s interpretation, which picks up several of his long-running themes – such as a theatrical ‘reality’ and the idea of performing the self (the sequence from which the above image is taken is a fascinating one because the lines between Gades-the-person, Gades-the-performer, and the role he plays within the production blur before our eyes as he breaks the fourth wall while looking in the mirror applying his performance make-up) – and combines them with Antonio Gades’s choreography to tell Lorca’s story through dance. One that I will revisit as part of CSC – and hopefully I’ll manage to re-kickstart the challenge because I let it go in 2015.

Leviathan

(5) Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, 2013)
It was starting to get embarrassing that I hadn’t seen this – and I’m sorry that I haven’t managed to see it in a cinema because it is visually astounding. I had been put off by a trailer that gave me the impression that I’d end up with motion sickness, but that wasn’t as pronounced within the film itself (although that’s possibly because I watched it on a small screen). It’s not often that you can say that a film contains sights that you’ve never seen before, but that is the case here – some of it just seems…primordial. I was frequently left wondering “How in the hell did they film that?”. I don’t have my copy to hand, so can’t take a screenshot of my favourite sequences but the birds at night is one standout, as are several of the underwater images.

 

Avant petalos grillados_06

Honourable mentions (alphabetical, * = short): Avant pétalos grillados* (Velasco Broca, 2007) [review] (viewable for free online – no subs but there are only a couple of spoken lines right at the start), The Belovs (Victor Kossakovsky, 1992) [available as VOD at Doc Alliance], Branka* (Mikel Zatarian, 2013) (I wrote about it briefly in this post) [viewable online for free at Márgenes], The Driver (Walter Hill, 1978), Eden Valley (Amber Production Team, 1994) [available to buy on DVD from Amber Films], The Leopard Man (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), Nostalgia de la luz / Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman, 2010).

My 20 Favourite Films of 2015

On By RebeccaIn Films1 Comment

Twelve months, five notebooks and approximately 312 films later (141 features and 171 shorts, according to what I’ve written in those five notebooks), this is how I saw 2015. On the old site my end-of-year lists focussed exclusively on Spanish cinema, but given that my intention with this new incarnation is to write about a more diverse range of cinema(s) it seems appropriate for my first end-of-year post here to reflect that. So this is my top 20 based on my viewings (in whatever format) throughout 2015. However, I have stuck to my previous rule that in order to be included, the film has to be from either this year or the previous one (2015 or 2014 in this instance) because it’s still the case that some titles take a while to arrive in the UK, but I want the list to be ‘new’ titles – I might post a separate list (old, but new to me) for films that don’t fit that criteria, if I have time (UPDATE: now online). I have already submitted Top 10s to #12filmsaflickering (you can see my ballot paper in a tweet by the poll’s organiser) and desistfilm (not online yet UPDATE: now online), but the former was restricted to UK releases only and the latter could include retrospective screenings – so my selection here is different. Apart from several titles seen in Gijón – and I’m conscious that having experienced them recently may have elevated some of them in my deliberations just because they are fresh in my mind – the list skews towards the first two thirds of the year because (apart from Gijón) I’ve not been to the cinema much in the last few months.
I went to fewer film festivals this year (just four – D’A Festival in Barcelona, Edinburgh, Berwick, and Gijón) but I was away for more days overall than last year and two of the festivals were outside the UK, so I feel like I still saw a broader range of films than if I had simply stuck to films with a UK theatrical release. I also reviewed a lot of films via screeners/streaming for festivals that I couldn’t travel to, which isn’t ideal but it’s another way of broadening my viewing habits. That said, there are a pile of ‘significant’ films that I’ve not managed to see yet. Some of them I already have copies of but I just didn’t have the time this month to try and catch up with them – and it seems a bit false to try and shoehorn in new films right at the end of the year. But films that I’d like to catch up with over the coming months include (in alphabetical order): 45 Years (dir. Andrew Haigh), Amour Fou (dir. Jessica Hausner), Best of Enemies (dir. Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon), Black Coal, Thin Ice (dir. Diao Yinan), Carol (dir. Todd Haynes), Girlhood (dir. Céline Sciamma), Güeros (dir. Alonso Ruizpalacios), Jauja (dir. Lisandro Alonso), Magical Girl (dir. Carlos Vermut), Maidan (dir. Sergei Loznitsa), Negociador / Negotiator (dir. Borja Cobeaga), Phoenix (dir. Christian Petzold), and Shaun the Sheep (dir. Mark Burton and Richard Starzak). The two films [there are others on my radar, but these are the two that I’m impatient to see] from 2015 that I would most like to see in a cinema in 2016 are La academia de las musas / The Academy of Muses (dir. Jose Luis Guerin) (which I’m hoping will at least make it to UK festivals) and Son of Saul (László Nemes) (which has a UK distributor).

But anyway, on to the films that I have seen this year…

a still from Risttuules/In the Crosswind

(1) Risttuules / In the Crosswind (dir. Martti Helde)
As I’ve said above, I’m wary of placing the films that I’ve seen most recently in end of year lists, but I think that even if I’d seen this film last January it would still be my film of the year – it is a genuine tour-de-force of a directorial debut and a film that continues to resonate in my mind more than a month after I saw it. It falls into that category of film where I would be cautious of rewatching it (on DVD, at least) because I wouldn’t want to diminish the out-of-nowhere impact that it had on me the first time. I wrote about it briefly in this report for desistfilm.

a still from essay film Transatlantique

(2) Transatlantique (dir. Félix Dufour-Laperrière)
a.k.a. the film that took me to Gijón. I initially encountered the film in the EIFF catalogue but wasn’t there on the day that it screened. So I first watched this black and white, dialogue-free documentary / essay film about a transatlantic voyage on the small screen of my laptop back in June, and then had the opportunity to see its dreamy poeticism writ large across the big screen last month in Spain. It is cinema as experience – you are placed inside a defined space and a self-contained world – and an exploration of the sublime. I don’t imagine that it will travel beyond festivals, so take any opportunity to see it that presents itself.

a still from Crumbs

(3) Crumbs (dir. Miguel Llansó)
[Review & interview] My favourite of the films I saw in Barcelona back in April. An inventive epic-adventure-meets-sci-fi-romance and a bittersweet tale of self-acceptance. I would like to revisit the film, not least because I don’t like the review that I wrote at the time (it’s overly descriptive and concentrates on plot at the expense of expanding upon the visual style) but realistically I don’t often have the time to do that. But it is now available to buy or stream from the Indiepix Films website (click here) – I think that the DVD is region 1, but the streaming and permanent download options are available worldwide.

the poster for Queen of Earth

(4) Queen of Earth (dir. Alex Ross Perry)
[Review] The last film that I saw in Barcelona – and as I predicted, a downward spiral into delusion and madness (and an examination of fraught female friendship) was indeed perfect Friday night viewing. I’m hopeful that it will get some kind of UK release in 2016 because the director’s Listen Up, Philip had a release this year and Elisabeth Moss is known here (both she and Katherine Waterston are excellent) – this kind of film should be catnip to independent cinemas, if only they could tear themselves away from programming multiplex fare.

Slow West film poster

(5) Slow West (dir. John Maclean)
The first of the films on this list to have had a UK theatrical release in 2015. I went in not knowing much about it other than it being a western and that Michael Fassbender and Ben Mendelsohn were in it (the presence of the latter in particular is swiftly becoming a sign that a film will be worth seeing). I came out quietly impressed and the film has stuck with me as the year progressed – I instinctively placed it in pole position for #12filmsaflickering. It manages to use a familiar genre and its symbols in a way that feels fresh – I particularly liked a sequence where Cody Smit-McPhee’s character walks through an ash cloud, turning phantasmal as he goes, and another scene where the forest suddenly comes alive before our eyes…but there are any number of small details that could be singled out. And the coat worn by Mendelsohn’s character looks worthy of its own spin-off prequel (certainly its acquisition would be a tale and a half).

The Duke of Burgundy

(6) The Duke of Burgundy (dir. Peter Strickland)
A surprisingly funny film and one of such dense and rich imagery that it builds up its own texture, not unlike the velveteen of the butterflies that preoccupy the two protagonists (Sidse Babett Knudsen and Chiara D’Anna). It’s not really a ‘daytime’ film and I had the rather odd experience of having to fit in a screening during my lunch break – but I’m glad that I did because something of its unique atmosphere would probably have been lost if I’d just watched it on VOD, away from the cocoon of a cinema.
The environment in which you first watch a given film inescapably shapes your perception of it – for example, a comedy watched in a full auditorium is a different experience to watching it at home on your own. In general, I would prefer to see a film for the first time in the form it was intended to be seen – on a big screen, with an audience. This brings me back to independent cinemas programming multiplex fare, and the knock-on effect that this has on the opportunities to see smaller films. The programming at my local “independent” has become progressively less diverse over the last few years but it has been particularly noticeable in the last 18 months because they are now regularly assigning their main screen (they have three, plus a gallery space) to films that also have saturation coverage at the multiplex that is ten minutes walk away (they are currently showing the new Star Wars film). The upshot of this is that the kinds of films that used to be their bread and butter are being pushed into the margins – either in the form of single screenings at random times of day (hence my lunchtime jaunt – incidentally, that 11:30am weekday screening in their 2nd-biggest screen was at least 75% full, so I wasn’t the only person who wanted to see it in the right setting) or the gallery screen (full disclosure: I’ve still not seen a film in this screen – I’m sure the sound system is top notch but a 33-seater is not a “cinema” in the form that I want to experience it, and I’m not paying £10 to do so either [the gallery screenings are after 5pm and therefore the full ticket price]). There have been multiple instances this year where films I’d like to have seen (Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini is one that springs to mind) were only shown on a “proper” screen once or twice in total and at times that fell during normal working hours, meaning that I couldn’t go. This only looks set to continue, which is very disappointing because it means that I’m more likely to see a film like Strickland’s on the BFI Player than in a cinema. End of rant.

an image from the documentary Hand Gestures

(7) Il gesto delle mani / Hand Gestures (dir. Francesco Clerici)
[Review] I’ve written about this recently, so I don’t have much to add. I do a fair amount of arts and crafts so I’m always interested in seeing artistic processes up close. I like that there’s no voiceover or intertitles explaining what we’re seeing – I became as absorbed in the process as the artisans onscreen were in their craft.

the poster for Frederick Wiseman's National Gallery

(8) National Gallery (dir. Frederick Wiseman)
I took a day trip to Edinburgh in order to see this (at the point when I booked my train tickets there was no sign of it coming to Newcastle – but it did belatedly arrive two weeks after my trip) because I knew that the artworks would merit being seen on as large a screen as possible. As with Hand Gestures, part of the pleasure to be taken from this film is simply in observing people who excel at their craft. This is a multifaceted exploration of the National Gallery as an institution and how it interprets a remit to give the public the appropriate tools with which to understand art. I particularly liked the demonstrations of how the level of knowledge and passion embodied by the resident experts and specialists opens up their respective subjects to a range of audiences, but also the behind-the-scenes glimpses at conservation and restoration, and the craftsmanship involved in all aspects of the place (e.g. the person who makes the frames). An enthralling documentary – the three hours fly by.

an image from essay film Life May Be

(9) Life May Be (dir. Mark Cousins and Mania Akbari)
This was on the festival circuit last year, but I missed a chance to see it in Edinburgh – luckily it had a VOD release in 2015 (it is available to rent or buy on GooglePlay and iTunes). I mentioned it on here earlier in the year but said that I wanted to watch some of Akbari’s other films before I wrote about it – I haven’t got any further than buying a couple so far, but hopefully it’s a film I’ll return to in 2016. The film is a conversation between the two directors in the form of exchanged video essays / letters and touches on exile, censorship, cultural ideals, gender and bodies. It made my brain fizz.

an image from Aferim!

(10) Aferim! (dir. Radu Jude)
Another of the films that I saw in Gijón. Rather inexplicably this picaresque Western has recently gone straight-to-DVD in the UK – so if you’re in the UK, it is worth tracking down (just wait for the price to drop because it’s unusually expensive). As I said in one of my dispatches from Gijón, ‘it just feels as if you’re in the hands of a director who has something to say and knows how he wants to say it’ – it’s a shame that UK audiences won’t get the chance to see it on the big screen.

the posters for films 11 to 20 in my top 20

(11) P’tit Quinquin (dir. Bruno Dumont)
[Review] The first of Dumont’s films that I’ve seen (and I’m told that it’s atypical of his work, so I may continue swerving the rest), this was probably the most left-of-field film I saw this year – a mishmash of the darkly funny and deeply unsettling, headed by two innately likeable social misfits (played by Bernard Pruvost and Alane Delhaye). Part of what’s unsettling is that these two personable leads espouse views that tend towards the casually racist (Dumont’s depiction of those attitudes is a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface), but also through how it generates humour from the behaviour of a non-professional cast, many of whom have learning difficulties – I occasionally wondered whether I was laughing at the outlandish Capitaine Van der Weyden or the uncontrollable tics of Bernard Pruvost, and the idea that it was the latter made me uncomfortable. It is incredibly funny (see it for the corpsing priests!) but in a way that also throws into relief the sadness of stunted lives and the limited opportunities of those living in the locale. And if you’ve seen it, you already have that song playing in your head.

(12) Enemy (dir. Denis Villeneuve)
The first film that I saw in the cinema in 2015 and one that still keeps creeping around my brain like its Louise Bourgeois-inspired spider. A narrative loop or a nightmarish dream? Either way, Jake Gyllenhaal’s character(s) has ‘woman problems’ in every sense of the term. It’s the kind of film where you’ll pick up on more details each time you watch it – having watched it only once so far, I’m left with more questions than answers because certain things from earlier in the film have to be rethought in light of what happens later. The penultimate shot is one of my favourites of the year.

(13) Obra (dir. Gregorio Graziosi)
[Review] Seen in Barcelona. This has a coincidental visual connection with Enemy insofar as both use architecture – in terms of detail and on a larger scale – to suggest the containment (or hemming-in) of their protagonists. Obra has received mixed reviews elsewhere – its chilly stylishness gets mentioned as a negative, but I think that slightly clinical, geometrical framing is a commentary on the life of the lead character. It’s not a film that sparks passions (it holds the viewer at one remove, as does its protagonist (Irandhir Santos)) but it has stuck with me (I didn’t have to think much about including it in this list) and the opening credit sequence is my favourite of the year. I’ve not seen any sign of it appearing in the UK (or anywhere else for that matter – I don’t know whether the D’A Festival was the end of its festival run?).

(14) Sicario (dir. Denis Villeneuve)
I don’t think I’ve ever had two films by the same director on the same end of year list. As pure cinematic spectacle this takes some beating, and Villeneuve directs the hell out of the material – having just got rid of heartburn that I’d been stuck with almost continually for more than a month, the tension during the bridge scene reignited it. The cinematography and soundtrack (the latter was partly responsible for my heartburn) have been rightfully singled out for praise but what I also liked is that during the action sequences a sense of spatial relations is sustained (and the bridge sequence is a case in point) – you know where people are in relation to each other, and by extension you know which way the camera is facing despite rapid cutting. It cannot be overstated how rare that is in modern action sequences. The trailer seemed to make more of Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro – to hide the fact that the protagonist (Emily Blunt) is female? – and the film doesn’t go in quite the direction I was expecting (I think I thought it was going to be more of a Platoon-style two-sided battle for the soul of Blunt’s character), and it tails off towards the end. I also know people who find its depiction of Mexico offensive – and I can’t really argue with that, but I also can’t deny that I thoroughly enjoyed watching it. When this gets a DVD release, I’m hoping to also watch Incendies and Prisoners (and rewatch Enemy) and then write something about Villeneuve’s recent output (his earlier films are unavailable in the UK).

(15) Noite sem distância / Night Without Distance (dir. Lois Patiño)
[Review] When you really like a directorial debut, you (or I, at least) approach the director’s next film with a certain sense of trepidation – can they fulfil the promise that you think they’ve demonstrated? Patiño’s Costa da morte / Coast of Death was my favourite film last year by quite a margin and I avoided reading about his three new shorts/installations (the other two are Estratos de la Imagen / Strata of the Image and Sombra Abierta / Open Shadow) prior to seeing this one in relation to Curtocircuito. This is a very different beast to Costa da morte, although it continues the director’s exploration of the Galician landscape. What could have been a gimmick (the image has been flipped into the negative) actually confers a phantasmal layer over proceedings and gives a sense of historical repetition – I would be intrigued to see whether this appears differently on a big screen (I watched it on my laptop).

(16) Hard to be a God (dir. Alexei German)
It’s weird that I should have so many black and white films on my list this year (five, by my count), but maybe people using colour need to up their game because the b&w ones are among the most visually imaginative I’ve seen in 2015. This film should have been in my #12filmsaflickering list because it had a UK release, but because I saw it in Barcelona (it was on limited release in Spain and at that point it didn’t have a UK distributor, so it seemed likely to be my only opportunity to see it on a big screen) it was in amongst festival films in my record of what I’ve watched, and so I overlooked it when I was making that list. Watching a three hour Russian epic with only Spanish subtitles was problematic – there were whole scenes where I didn’t know what was going on, or at least didn’t understand the subtleties because I usually picked up the gist of what was transpiring via the onscreen action – but visually it is something else. The cinema where I saw it – the Zumzeig Cinema, about 30 minutes walk from Plaça de Catalunya (there’s probably a simple metro route but I prefer to get lost above ground, so I went everywhere on foot) – is also admirably diverse in its programming and I hope that I get the chance to go back there sometime in the future.

(17) Dead Slow Ahead (dir. Mauro Herce)
[Review] Another film that I’ve reviewed very recently, so I don’t currently have much to add. I originally watched it on Festival Scope because I didn’t think that it was going to be in Gijón (it was a late addition to the programme) and then got the chance to see it on the big screen on my last night in Spain – something that underlined what a difference it can make to see a film in the cinema because it was a much more immersive experience.

(18) Fidelio, Alice’s Journey (dir. Lucie Borleteau)
[Review] Earlier this year, UK distributor Soda Pictures used 50 members of the public (who had to apply) to choose its next release. I was one of the 50 (I can’t say that it was a particularly satisfying experience) and this was one of the 10 films under consideration – it didn’t ‘win’, but it was my favourite (I was fairly out of sync with the tastes of the group, at least insofar as Soda’s calculation of the final rankings), so I was pleased when it got picked up by New Wave Films for a UK release. There aren’t many films directed by women on this list – that’s a result of what I’ve managed to see this year. Although the gender of a director isn’t really a criteria by which I chose my viewings (any more than I would vote for a politician simply because they were in possession of a uterus – the ideas are the thing!), I prioritise seeing ‘smaller’ films (i.e. the ones that don’t get saturation distribution) and films directed by women almost invariably fall into that category. So in theory I should manage to see a decent number of films by women in a given year, but 2015 didn’t work out like that. What I liked about Borleteau’s directorial debut was that her protagonist (played by Ariane Labed) is positioned as the desiring subject rather than the desired object: that’s fairly rare in onscreen representations. I’ll be interested to see what Borleteau gets up to next, but in the meantime this should get a UK DVD release soon.

(19) Hitchcock / Truffaut (dir. Kent Jones)
This documentary has been picked up by Dogwoof in the UK, so it will be getting a theatrical release in 2016 (it is also already listed for pre-order in their DVD store – here). It is a celebration of cinephilia – that of Hitchcock and Truffaut, and also that of the directors influenced by the 1964 book – and the book itself rendered into audiovisual form. It has made me want to reread the book (it’s probably more than 10 years since I last looked at it) and work my way through Hitchcock’s entire oeuvre – there are still so many of his films that I haven’t seen.

(20) Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (dir. Christopher McQuarrie)
Are there many film series that manage to improve as they go along (especially when they’ve gone off the boil along the way)? At times wilfully daft – and with a bit of a meh villain – but with action sequences to set your pulse racing, and the sense that you were watching a precision-made piece of filmmaking, this was one of my most enjoyable trips to the cinema this year. And Rebecca Fergusson came out of nowhere to waltz off with the film.

 

Honourable mentions (alphabetical, * = short): Abdul & Hamza (dir. Marko Grba Singh) [review], Crimson Peak (dir. Guillermo del Toro) [review], Cuenta con nosotros* (dir. Pablo Vara) [festival report], Hacked Circuit* (dir. Deborah Stratman) [festival report], Inside Out (dir. Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen), Jet Lag (dir. Eloy Domínguez Serén), Krisha (dir. Trey Edward Shults) [festival report], Llévate mis amores / All of Me (dir. Arturo González Villaseñor) [review], El movimiento / The Movement (dir. Benjamín Naishtat), Ni Dios ni Santa María / Neither God Nor Santa María* (dir. Samuel M Delgado and Helena Girón) [review], ReMine: El último movimiento obrero / ReMine: The Last Working Class Movement (dir. Marcos M. Merino), Retratos de identificaçao / Identification Photos (dir. Anita Leandro), Scrapbook* (dir. Mike Hoolboom), Sueñan los androides / Androids Dream (dir. Ion de Sosa) [review], World of Tomorrow* (dir. Don Hertzfeldt).

Festival Report: Asturian shorts

On By RebeccaIn Films, Spanish Cinema

Cuenta con nosotros_Dani Pérez Prada and David Pareja

More than 70 shorts were screened in Gijón – films from around the world, in and out of competition. I concentrated on the Spanish ones (for obvious reasons) but even then I didn’t manage to see all of them. In the end I’ve written about some of the ones that were in the Asturian section – I’m not familiar with cinema from the region, so this seemed like a good place to start. If you cast your mind back to my Gijón dispatches, you may remember that I had one evening when I wasn’t well and ended up returning to the hotel rather than going to the final session of the night. That session was for the Asturian films that were in competition, so I’d like to thank Alicia Albares, Roberto F. Canuto, Pablo A. Neila, Kiko and Javier Prada, Pablo Vara, Daniel Vázquez, and Benjamín Villaverde for giving me access to their respective films after the fact. For reasons of space, I could only focus on three of the films in my report, but hopefully I will have the occasion to write about the others in the future. My report can be found over at Eye for Film – here.

5th Festival Márgenes: free to view online 13th-31st December

On By RebeccaIn Films, Spanish Cinema1 Comment

Festival Margenes 2015

The first online festival in Spain specifically dedicated to films without a commercial release or without access to the normal methods of distribution, Festival Márgenes is now in its fifth year and continues to celebrate and support filmmakers and films committed to offering alternative perspectives on both cinema and society. The full list of criteria that the films have to meet can be found here – but essentially they have to be more than 40 minutes long, to have not been distributed, and to originate from a specific set of countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain, Uruguay and Venezuela). The films can be of any genre, although it’s noticeable that documentaries tend to feature strongly.
The festival takes place in cinemas in Madrid, Monterrey, Barcelona, Montevideo, Córdoba, México DF, and Santiago de Chile from the 3rd December and then moves online from the 13th until the 31st. The films are all available to stream for free (although there are a couple that aren’t viewable outside of specified locations – noted below). There are Spanish subtitles on films that aren’t in Spanish, but as far as I’m aware there are no English subtitles this year. But even if your Spanish is rudimentary, I’d encourage you to give it a go – a) because cinema communicates through visuals (and non-verbal sound) at least as much as it does through verbal interactions, b) you have the chance to watch some films that you possibly won’t encounter elsewhere.
I haven’t had time to start watching the 2015 selection yet, but I wrote about the 4th edition last year and saw several films that I really liked – namely África 815 (Pilar Monsell, 2014) [UPDATE Oct 2016: the film is available to rent on the Márgenes VOD platform – there’s no indication whether subtitles are included], El gran vuelo / The Great Flight (Carolina Astudillo, 2014) [UPDATE Oct 2016: also available to rent – likewise, no indication of subtitles], and Propaganda (Colectivo MAFI, 2014). Hopefully I’ll manage to watch more this year. The festival prizes have already been awarded (indicated below – but see the website for full details / jury citations and the breakdown of what the prizes entail), so I will prioritise those titles but I also want to see Revolução Industrial [Industrial Revolution] (which I’m sure I read about last year in relation to other festivals), Transeúntes (which was recently at the Seville Film Festival), and the special bonus film (not part of the competition) Ragazzi (Raúl Perrone, 2014) – I saw Perrone’s Favula in Barcelona earlier in the year (my review) and would like to see if his other films maintain the fevered rarity of that one. So basically I need more hours in the day between now and the end of the year.
It’s also worth pointing out that Márgenes has its own VOD catalogue outside of the festival – a mixture of shorts and features (some viewable for free, others pay-per-view for a modest fee) and all at the more original and idiosyncratic end of Spanish production, including several films I’ve written about previously (for example, Edificio España (Víctor Moreno, 2013) and Branka (Mikel Zatarain, 2013)).

Anyway, the full list of films in the 2015 official selection is below – clicking on the title will take you to the streaming page for that film. I will post something further when I’ve managed to watch some of the films. UPDATE (28/12/15): I’ve started watching the films and will add * next to the title if I find that they have English subtitles (note: I’m only going to have time to watch a few, so if you’re interested I suggest that you try streaming them to see whether subtitles appear). UPDATE (Oct 2016): several of the films from this collection are now available to rent on the Márgenes VOD platform – note that subtitles aren’t mentioned, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t any (that was also the case during the festival period and all of the ones that I watched had subs).

Alexfilm (Pablo Chavarría, 2015), Mexico, 60 min.
As cidades e as trocas (Luísa Homem and Pedro Pinho, 2014), Portugal, 139 min.
El corral y el viento* (Miguel Hilari, 2014), Bolivia, 55 min. BEST FILM
La extranjera (Miguel Ángel Blanca, 2015), Spain, 70 min [only available in Spain].
La maldad* (Joshua Gil, 2015), Mexico, 74 min. SPECIAL MENTION BY THE JURY
La sombra* (Javier Olivera, 2015), Argentina, 72 min. CAMIRA PRIZE
L’Esma del Temps (El Sentido del Tiempo) (Alexandra Garcia-Vilà, Marta González, Marta Saleta, 2015), Spain, 54 min. HONORARY MENTION
Microbús (Alejandro Small, 2014), Peru, 44 min.
Navajazo (Ricardo Silva, 2014), Mexico, 75 min. [only available in Spain, Mexico, Chile & Uruguay].
Next (Elia Urquiza, 2015), Spain / USA, 72 min.
Revolução Industrial (Frederico Lobo and Tiago Hespanha, 2014), Portugal, 72 min.
Tú y Yo (Oriol Estrada and Natalia Cabral, 2014), Dominican Republic, 85 min. EXHIBITION PRIZE
Transeúntes* (Luis Aller, 2015), Spain, 101 min.

Review: Hand Gestures (Francesco Clerici, 2015)

On By RebeccaIn Films

Hand Gestures_poster

I briefly wrote about this documentary earlier in the year, but I have now written a review because it has had a limited release in the UK. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get to the one-off screening in my home city, so I’m hoping that Hand Gestures makes the jump to DVD or VOD because I’d like to watch it again – it is one of my favourite films of the year. My review is up over at Eye for Film – here.

Festival Report: Gijón, part 2

On By RebeccaIn Films

Transatlantique_09

The second of two reports I’ve written for desistfilm about films I saw in Gijón is now online. This one focuses on the Convergencias films – in essence, I’ve looked at what the films have in common (interesting use of sound / silence and idiosyncratic visuals).

Links to reviews will continue to appear in the other post(s).

UPDATE (29/12/15): the 1-hour recording of El séptimo vicio that centred on Convergencias is now online (here). I am in the first twenty minute section (specifically 04:20-09:21) alongside Félix Dufour-Laperrière and Víctor Paz. The middle section consists of Martín Cuesta, Pablo González-Taboada, Eduardo Guillot, Carlota Moseguí and David Tejero discussing the state of film criticism in Spain, and then the final section is Martín and Víctor.

Reviews: Gijón

On By RebeccaIn Films

Dead-slow-ahead

I have a few reviews of films I saw in Gijón forthcoming over at Eye for Film. I’m starting with three of the features (I will add links to this post as and when they are published), but there will also be something on (some of) the Spanish shorts – I haven’t decided whether this is going to entail reviews, a report, or some combination of the two. I will either extend this post to include links to reviews of the shorts or write a separate post for them – it’ll depend on what I end up writing.

UPDATE (21/12/15), a review of one of the short films in the main competition:

I interviewed Adán Aliaga earlier in the year in relation to his feature (co-directed with David Valero), El arca de Noé / Noah’s Ark – that interview can be found here.

Festival Report: Gijón, part 1

On By RebeccaIn Films

Communing_01

Over at desistfilm, the first of two reports I am writing about films I saw in Gijón is now online. This one focuses on the experimental titles in the FICXLab section.

The second report is an overview of Convergencias and it should be online later this week.

My Gijón Top 10:

On By RebeccaIn Films

Leaving aside Transatlantique – as I was the reason that that film was there – my top 10 of FICX53:

1. In the Crosswind (Martti Helde, 2014)
2. Aferim! (Radu Jude, 2015)
3. Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce, 2015)
4. Hitchcock/Truffaut (Kent Jones, 2015)
5. Krisha (Trey Edward Shults, 2015)
6. Black (Adil El Arbi and Bilal Fallah, 2015)
7. André’s Eyes (Antonio Borges Correia, 2015)
8. Test (Alexander Kott, 2014)
9. El Movimiento (Benjamín Naishtat, 2015)
10. Communing (Helga Fanderl, 2015)

[UPDATE (09/12/15): I’ve realised that I’ve missed out Land of Mine (Martin Zandvliet, 2015) but I don’t want to re-do my list and bump Fanderl out, so please consider it as being part of the second half]. I’ve learnt that if I don’t want to return to work a complete wreck, then I have to pace myself at festivals and to also acknowledge when I’m too tired to give something my full attention (and have an early night instead) – so I know that I didn’t see as many films as I could have done (or as many as I’d put in my original schedule), but I feel like I ended up with the right balance between watching films and exploring the city. With that in mind, I prioritised the first screening of each of the Convergencias films (when people were giving their presentations) and also the experimental films (I’m less likely to get the opportunity to see those elsewhere). Doing that meant that there were some films that I really wanted to see but wasn’t able to because they clashed with those other events (or on one day because I just wasn’t feeling well). Films that were in Gijón that I’d like to catch up with in 2016 include: Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, 2015); Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015) [I’m presuming that this will get UK distribution]; Neon Bull (Gabriel Mascaró, 2015); La Novia (Paula Ortiz, 2015) [the two screenings this had both clashed with Convergencias screenings]; Paulina (Santiago Mitre, 2015); Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) [in this case, I know that it has UK distribution next year but I’m now all the more interested since Víctor Paz described it to me as “una obra maestra…y la mejor ópera prima desde Citizen Kane“]; Un monstruo de mil cabezas (Rodrigo Plá, 2015).

Postcard from Gijón: Days 7-9

On By RebeccaIn Films

IMG_1791

My Gijón adventure is now at an end and so I will quickly round up the last few days before checking out of the hotel.

Transatlantique_04
Thursday saw the second presentation of Transatlantique. I was less nervous this time and I felt that my introduction was a bit more fluid. I interviewed Félix Dufour-Laperrière while the film was screening and then returned for the Q&A. There were film production students in the audience and they asked very different questions to the previous session (most of them seemed to be specialising in sound and it’s an interesting film from that perspective).
Next, myself and Félix – and the other critics participating in Convergencias – went to a radio station to take part in a recording of El séptimo vicio (The Seventh Vice) for RNE3 (Radio Nacional de España 3). Host Javier Tolentino was amused to learn that I have listened to the programme as a podcast on iTunes – he visits a lot of film festivals and talks to interesting filmmakers (especially in terms of the kinds of Spanish films that I like – but the programme covers international cinema, not just Spanish films). The entire episode (they’re usually about 59 minutes long) will be centred on Convergencias, so I will put a link on here when it has been broadcast (you can listen to it online without iTunes). My mind went blank a couple of times (including in response to “Who is your favourite Spanish director?” and in the very last round-up with the group) but overall it wasn’t too bad. UPDATE (29/12/15): the podcast is now online – here – I am mainly in the first section between 04:20-09:21.
The only films I saw that day were shorts in La noche de cortos españoles [The Night of Spanish Shorts] – as I’ve said before, I’m going to write about the shorts as a group later, so I won’t expand any further now except to say that there was real variety in the selection.

The Road02
Friday saw the sixth – and final – Convergencias film: The Road (Rana Salem, 2015), chosen by Eduardo Guillot (you can read Eduardo’s text, here). For me, the film seemed quite different to the other Convergencias films (which share some characteristics, although each interprets them differently) although it does make use of sound in an atmospheric way. A road movie of sorts, we see an unnamed couple (played by director Rana Salem and her real-life partner Guy Chartouni) in the aftermath of some kind of unspecified upset – both of them seem distracted and the woman is clearly in an emotionally fragile state – and they set off on a journey from Beirut into the Lebanese countryside. The structure is very fragmented. There are repeated cuts to black (which are held for several seconds at a time) and what are eventually revealed to be flashbacks (the chronology of events isn’t clear until relatively late in the film) that show the two leads in different domestic/familial environments. Eduardo said in his introduction that it’s a film that asks questions of the audience rather than supplying the answers, but I was left a bit nonplussed by it overall.

el-movimiento
Next was El movimiento / The Movement (Benjamín Naishtat, 2015), which screened without subtitles so I’m not going to claim to have followed everything that went on. Set in Argentina in 1835 (by weird coincidence the same year that Aferim! is set) in the aftermath of what the festival catalogue tells me was the emancipation war of the Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata, a fratricidal conflict develops while the new administration settles in. Several armed groups are wandering the Pampa, looking for resources but each also claims to be the legitimate representative of El Movimiento. The leader of one of these groups, known simply as el Señor (Pablo Cedrón), presents himself with the language of idealism and the moral high ground but unleashes hideously violent acts via his henchmen. Shot in black and white, the film is visually very striking – the lighting is very high contrast (it mainly seemed to rely on light sources within the frame), casting jet-black shadows across the numerous close-ups of faces, and at times it looks almost like a painting. The soundtrack is also unusual given the era in which the film takes place because it includes electronic sounds (late in the film, a truck and a motorbike also cross the back of the frame) which build to a low rumbling threat – it becomes quite oppressive. I would watch it again with subtitles – in order to follow the subtleties of the political machinations, which were beyond my Spanish – so hopefully it will make its way to a UK festival.

Lamb02
I wasn’t feeling well on Friday night, so I didn’t go to any of the later screenings. Therefore the next film for me was on Saturday: Lamb (Yared Zeleke, 2015). The first Ethiopian film to be selected for Cannes, Lamb follows nine-year-old Ephraim (Rediat Amare) after his father leaves him with relatives in the Ahmar Mountains while he seeks work in Addis Abeba. Ephraim’s best friend is Chuni, a sheep who belonged to his late mother. Chuni brings Ephraim into conflict with his new relatives because his uncle wants to slaughter the animal for upcoming festivities – Ephraim begins to concoct an escape plan for him and Chuni to get out of there and either on the road to return to his birthplace (where he has other relatives) or in search of his father. It’s the second Ethiopia-set film I’ve seen this year (the other being Crumbs) and it makes full use of the astounding vistas of the green mountains and the valleys below. Ephraim is a sweet-natured and sensitive protagonist and the film is effectively a coming of age tale. I’m probably going to review it, so I won’t say any more for now (plus I’m trying to get this up before I leave the hotel).

Dead Slow Ahead
I went to the Closing Ceremony (again hosted by Carlos Areces) on Saturday night – the list of award winners can be found here. So the last film of the festival for me was Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce, 2015), a documentary set on a cargo ship and the directorial debut of the director of photography of films such as Arraianos (Eloy Enciso, 2012). There are obvious points of similarity with Transatlantique but the two films are also completely their own things – Dead Slow Ahead puts me in mind of a sci-fi film at certain points with a soundscape that includes a lot of electronic beeping and an alien strangeness to some of its more abstract images and heightened colour palette. I actually watched Dead Slow Ahead on Festival Scope a couple of weeks ago, not realising that it was going to be in Gijón, but it is a completely different experience on the big screen and with surround sound – and it is another very immersive film. It is my intention to write something about the two films together (possibly also including Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, 2013) because it seems to me that it would be impossible not to acknowledge that film in relation to them – although not necessarily ‘an influence’ as such, it’s more that in the eyes of the spectator a connection will be made (if they’ve seen it)), so again I’m not going to expand on the film any further at this juncture (she says, with one eye on the clock).

So that is the end of the Festival Internacional de Cine de Gijón. I will be reviewing some of the films I’ve seen (I haven’t had time to write anything other than these postcards while I’ve been in Spain), I am writing a report on the experimental section for Desistfilm and probably also an overview of Convergencias, and a report on the Spanish shorts for Eye for Film. It will take a while for me to write all of those things (not least because I return to work on Tuesday), but I will link to them on here once they’re online.
I’ll just finish by saying muchísimas gracias a Martín Cuesta y Víctor Paz por invitarme a Gijón como participante en Convergencias – ha sido una gran experiencia y espero que puedo volver para futuras ediciones (y que vemos en otros festivales también).

Postcard from Gijón: Days 5-6

On By RebeccaIn Films

IMG_1720

This is now the longest that I’ve stayed at a given festival and I’m at that stage where time has become elongated – my days of the week are all mixed up and I’m finding it hard to judge where I am in the day itself.

Aferim

Anyway, according to my notebook it was on day 5 that I saw Aferim! (Radu Jude, 2015) – another of the competition titles, and one of my favourites of the festival so far. If I had to classify it, I’d go for ‘picaresque Western’ with touches of Don Quijote. Set in the Romania of 1835, the film follows the adventures of father and son police constables Constandin (Teodor Corban) and Ionita (Mihai Comanoiu) as they pursue an escaped Gypsy slave (Carfin – played by Toma Cuzin) who is accused of stealing money from the local lord. With satirical touches – and no end of idioms, courtesy of Constandin’s fondness for folkloric sayings – the dialogue reveals xenophobia, racism, class strife and feudal injustices to be endemic to the time (of course, this can also be taken as commentary on the present as well). Even while the characters are conscious of these injustices (Constandin and Ionita discover that the situation with Carfin is not quite what they’ve been told – and Ionita goes as far as to suggest that they should pretend that they can’t find him because they know that he’s not guilty of the crime he’s accused of), they nonetheless feel that they can do nothing to change them (“The world will stay as it is, and you can’t change it”). The film is laced with humour and shot in a crisp black and white utilising the varied Romanian landscape as if viewed by John Ford – it just feels as if you’re in the hands of a director who has something to say and knows how he wants to say it. Recommended.

IMG_1719

Next I went to see an exhibition of photographs of Mexico by Luis Buñuel. He shot twenty films in Mexico, from Gran Casino (1947) to Simon of the Desert (1965), which amounts to almost two thirds of his filmography. The photos seem to have been taken while he was scouting for locations – the exhibition indicates which film they relate to and uses a still from the film to show how they appeared onscreen – and serve as an illustration of his eye for detail and exhaustive preparation. I thought that the next event was a roundtable discussion with the other Convergencias participants, but it turned out that I’d misunderstood – we were interviewed on camera (en español, claro) by TCM/Telecable about our choice of film and what else we’d seen at the festival that we’d recommend. I haven’t watched the video yet, but I’ll post a link within this post when I have (provided I haven’t made an arse of myself).

Andre's Eyes02
Next was the fourth of the Convergencias titles – Os olhos de André / André’s Eyes (Antonio Borges Correia, 2015), a Portuguese film chosen by Jesús Choya (you can read Jesús’s text on the film, here). Jesús is the youngest of the participants (he is only 16) and I was really impressed by how articulate he was in explaining his choice of film during the interview earlier in the day – that, in combination with the fact that the film had also been recommended to me by a friend, meant that I was keen to see this one. The film tells the story of a single father and his sons, the youngest of whom has been taken into care after their estranged mother raised a question about the child’s paternity. The story is ‘performed’ (probably better to say ‘recreated’) by the actual family involved – apart from the mother, everyone in the film is essentially playing themselves. It feels like a very honest film without any artificial constructions, and it is impactful in an emotional sense because you watch events that are obviously traumatic for a family, being re-lived. I know that the film is on Festival Scope, so I’m intending to rewatch it when I get home – I may return to it on here at a later date.

Poster_Thoughts
The last film of the day for me was The Thoughts That Once We Had (Thom Andersen, 2015) – an essay film that the opening titles tell us is ‘a personal history’ of cinema but refracted through Gilles Deleuze’s book The Movement-Image (1986). I loved the journey through cinema and the juxtapositions making connections (or illustrating evolutions) across different eras and cinemas, but for me there was too much Theory (with a capital ‘T’). It may have been the lateness of the hour, but I found it difficult to assimilate and process the numerous quotations from the book with sufficient speed to make my own connections with the images (and to personally join the dots between words and image). I’d watch it again (for the clips above all) although I’d probably prefer to do so in a format where I could pause it and think the ideas through as I went along.

Black01

I spent Wednesday morning writing the previous one of these posts (I’m trying to write them regularly, otherwise I end up with a glut of stuff to write up at the end – also, writing just a paragraph on each film seems to be a good way to fix it in my mind). So the first film of the day for me was another of the competition titles – Black (Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, 2015), a Belgian production and adaptation of two novels by Dirk Bracke. The film is effectively a contemporary Romeo and Juliet within the world of rival urban gangs – and also a commentary on the experience of immigrants and first-generation nationals in Belgium, because the gangs are Sub-Saharan African and Moroccan in origin. Mavela (Martha Canga Antonio) and Marwan (Aboubakr Bensaihi) fall in love after a chance encounter at the police station (both have been arrested for theft) and begin a clandestine relationship that puts them in danger with their respective gangs. I have some issues with the depiction of sexual violence against women within the film (the female characters are treated like meat by the males). For me, the opening sequence, where we intuit that a woman is being sexually assaulted through the combination of screams and abstract patterns of colour, movement and light that are seen through glass (we cannot explicitly see the event itself), was a more imaginative representation than a later assault when a female character is stripped and effectively put on display for the camera as well as her attackers. It could perhaps be argued that that is in keeping with how the men who are present view her but I get a bit fed up with women being filmed in traumatic situations in that way. However that issue aside, the film has a lot to commend it – it is directed with real verve (and makes excellent use of Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back to Black’, here performed by Oscar and the Wolf feat. Tsar) and has two engaging performances from the main protagonists. I’ve seen it described on twitter as ‘Romeo and Juliet as directed by Tony Scott’ – and I wouldn’t disagree with that, but I would take it as a positive. I saw it in the press screening but from what I can gather it was a hit at the public screening later in the day.

Test_02
Next was the fifth of the Convergencias films – Ispytanie / Test (Alexander Kott, 2014), chosen by Pablo González-Taboada (you can read Pablo’s text on the film, here). If In the Crosswind has only voiceover and no dialogue, and Transatlantique has audible (but incomprehensible) voices, Test goes one step further with not a single word spoken and instead communicates through the actors’ expressions. There are no titles at all, so I’ve had to look up when and where the film is set – according to The Hollywood Reporter, ‘the geographical setting can be deduced as somewhere near Semey in modern-day Kazakhstan, then known as Semipalatinsk — notorious as the site of the USSR’s first nuclear test, in August 1949′. A teenage girl (Elena An) and her father (Karim Pakachakov) live self-sufficiently in a small homestead on a windswept and parched plain in silent harmony. Two suitors (one local (Narinman Bekbulatov-Areshev) and the other an interloper (Danila Rassomakhin)) will compete for the girl’s attention and affections, while we also note ominous convoys of military vehicles crossing the plain. I haven’t seen any of Kott’s other films but in his introduction Pablo said that this one represents a step up in terms of the director’s cinematic expression. It’s a visually imaginative film – highlighting the textures and details of the characters’ lives and the natural world around them but also shooting them in a way that feels fresh (for example, there are quite a lot of overhead shots that give us an alternative perspective on the lay of land). One small detail that I liked – Rassomakhin’s character turns up in the dark at one point, in order to project the photo he took of the girl onto the side of her home. As he disappears out into the darkness again, he attempts to light his way by flicking a lighter on and off – the small light momentarily hovers in the blackness, each time appearing slightly further along, until a match cut turns the flame into a small bird in the sky the following morning. A really beautiful film.
The last session of the day was another of the FICXLab screenings, this time a retrospective of Portuguese artists João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. The screening took the form of 26 16mm shorts, split into two programmes of 35 minutes, taken from their “philosophical-poetic-fictions”. Many of them are humorous and playful – visual ‘jokes’ or experimenting with the form in images that contain multiple exposures to overlay different aspects of a theme. I’ll have to give some thought as to what the overarching connections were because there wasn’t any contextualisation within the films themselves and they’re not artists with whom I am familiar.

To be continued…