Punto De Vista Film Festival 2023

Eventide

Sharon Lockhart

This single-shot landscape film experiments with the rich sonic and visual resources of the night to evoke both wonder and mourning.
Dusk falls on the coast of Gotland. One by one, individuals arrive in search of something amid the sand and rock. With only the glow of their cell phones to see, their eyes are fixed upon the land, even as their paths cross and light is shared. Yet amid the darkening sky, constellations emerge, with each star growing brighter relative to their proximity to us. Meanwhile, the blinding flash of the occasional meteor highlights the distances among stars and ourselves, opening our gaze to the unknown.
At once melancholy and utopian, Eventide captures the myopia and missed connections of a scopophilic age, while honouring the powers of darkness, both cinematic and natural, to collapse distance and render the invisible visible.

Notre village (Our Village)

Comes Chahbazian

In the early 90s, in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), civilian volunteers all from the same village choose to take up arms in resistance, to liberate their land. Each in turn, they weave the fabric of their joint story. In this village life, everyday gestures are still charged with the silent presence of the war. And then, three decades later, History repeats itself. War flares up again.

El polvo ya no nubla nuestros ojos (After The Dust)

Colectivo Silencio

A set of memories, a series of readings. After three hundred years as a nation, Peru has accumulated many struggles in different regions and at different times. This Super 8 mm film calls in fighters and debts in a compilation of discourses from the most intimate side of our recent history.

Tótem (2023)

Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico

As the numbers of missing people in Mexico continue to rise, Tótem explores the particularities of this type of violence, and imagines new forms of resistance in the movements that have emerged against it. The story of two archaeologists searching in vain for an ancient Olmec head in a murky river appears recurrently, questioning the very act of documenting the absent and the invisible.

Miyama, Kyoto Prefecture

Rainer Komers

For 30 years, Uwe has lived with his wife in the mountains of Miyama north of Kyoto. A German shakuhachi player in the diaspora, local and outsider. Everyday life unfolds between rice cultivation and Ruhr speak. The sounds of the flute swirl in the moment, past pushes into the foreground. What will happen tomorrow? Where will one be buried? A fresco of growing and passing.

Teléfono, Navidad

Malena Zambrani

Just before Christmas, Baby, aged 84, and her son Julio make different telephone calls to congratulate their friends and relatives, on their home land line.

Bide bazterrean hi eta ni kantari

Peru Galbete

"Look for the part that's missing from this book; there, somewhere in your house it's kept. I've tried to walk as far as halfway between you and I; I can't carry on. The respect I bear for what's yours does not let me go any further." Joxean Artze

Cette maison (This House)

Miryam Charles

Cette maison is a heartbreaking journey into memory and an experimental treatment of an emotional state. Miryam Charles ― whose short film Second Generation screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019 ― has made one of the year's most formally challenging features: a study of the horrible stasis of grief seen through a meditative lens. In a striking, stylized presentation, Charles resurrects her murdered cousin Tessa ― represented in the film by Schelby Jean-Baptiste ― to tell us about the life she was denied and have conversations with her mother, Valeska (Florence Blain Mbaye), about the cruelty of their separation. Emotional and political currents intertwine as Charles explores her own youth for warning signs. She recreates her family watching the Quebec referendum of 1995 in their Laval home while packing to leave for the United States in case the vote went in favour of separation ― and considers the contentious relationship between Haiti, Canada, and the US. Time and space collapse into a single awful moment, a chasm into which Tessa has disappeared. Cette maison is an act of reclamation, recreating Tessa in body and spirit on 16mm film so she can be remembered and heard ― by the film and by the audience ― once more.

Al borde del agua (On the Water's Edge)

Maria Elorza Iñigo Salaberria

There are pictures that do not exist. And pictures that exist twice. Neither of these places exists any more.

Notas para una película (Notes for a Film)

Ignacio Agüero

A film which portrays the radical transformation of the territory of Araucanía at the end of the 19th through the eyes of a young foreigner, Gustave Verniory. The film draws a sensitive cinematic space, playing with and creating a dialogue between past and contemporary. It is a path that meanders between human and geographic landscapes, in order to reveal the deep essence of the Araucanía territory.

De songes au songe d'un autre miroir (Of Dreams in the Dream of Another Mirror)

Yunyi Zhu

I tried to tell a story without images through images, but I think I will never succeed because their story is outside of my story.

Éclaireuses (Leading Lights)

Lydie Wisshaupt-Claudel

La Petite École in the heart of Brussels welcomes children aged six to fifteen who have never attended school, and who are often in exile. Marie and Juliette have created this place outside of the conventional structures of learning, where children can learn to be or become children again, with the aim of entering a conventional school one day. First and foremost, the challenge for these two "leading lights" is to teach the young newcomers, sometimes suffering from post-traumatic stress, how to leave the family circle and follow a rhythm within a community of similarly aged peers. To do this, Marie and Juliette fill their days with rituals and activities during which they observe, assess, readapt and propose. What kind of school do you offer children who have never been to one? From failures that do not seem to be such, to small victories, they thus succeed in preparing the children to "be, by themselves". Lydie Wisshaupt-Claudel captures the patience and experimental approach of these two extraordinary women, with sublime framing and light that portray the hope and humanism that reign in this place.

APOCALIPSIS 20 21 22

Julius Richard Tamayo

"If any man shall add to these things, God shall add unto him the plagues written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from these things that are written in this book." Apocalypse 22:18-19 / "We are blind before the Apocalypse." Günther Anders

Nagyapám kertje (Grandpa's garden)

Varga Gábor

The passing of life, getting older and the things that were once so strong, which are now becoming more and more fragile in this tender and sober portrayal of a human being who is loved and who loves life.

Tembiapo Pyharegua (Night Work)

Elvira Sánchez Poxon Christian Bagnat

Wishes, dreams, plans for the future: every day they are spoken aloud, like an incantation. A record of a future being constructed slowly, night by night. A cinematic chronicle of the life of a Guaraní-speaking Paraguayan community living in Cuenca, Spain. A weave of experiences in which filming is like existing.

Boulevards de la Senne

Juliette Achard Ian Menoyot

On his arrival in Belgium, a French outcast wrote: "The Senne, recalling in name only the great river of Paris, is a trickle of muddy water: it will only manage to enhance the beauty of the city if it is buried beneath the famous boulevard of which the new king laid the foundation stone in fastuous ceremony."

Maayo wonaa keerol (The River is not a Border)

Alassane Diago

Forty protagonists, witnesses and victims look back at the 1989 massacres on both sides of the Senegal River, the border between Mauritania and Senegal, in order to understand what really happened, and try to take a step towards reconciliation together.

Chaylla

Clara Teper Paul Pirritano

Lens, in Northern France. 23-year-old Chaylla is fighting to free herself from a violent relationship. However, her determination comes up against a part of herself that still hopes to share her life with the father of her children. And if Chaylla, head held high, decides to press charges and reclaim her rights in the face of the society and the patriarchy in which she has no confidence, it is also thanks to the support of a duo of women – her mother-in-law and her best friend – who accompany her on a daily basis. It is with them that she shares her sorrow and passions, that she holds back her tears, smiles softly or sings at the top of her voice. The camera, always as close as possible to her face, enhances its strength, while the expressivity and magnetism of the close-ups are reminiscent of those of Renée Falconetti. Clara Teper and Paul Pirritano have made a magnificent first feature-length film shedding upsetting light on violence against women and the difficulties of finding one's own way to justice. This social drama is infused with the extreme humanity and sincerity of a woman, Chaylla.