Punto De Vista Film Festival 2022

Los caballos mueren al amanecer (Horses Die at Dawn)

Ione Atenea

<p>At least two ways of making films come together here. The first is the film made by Ione Atenea in search of the three brothers and sisters who left the vestiges of their lives in a little house in Vallcarca, and the second is the one that these brothers and sisters ─Antonio, Rosita and Juanito─ thought up in order to give full rein to their unbridled interests and creativity. The eldest brother earned his living as a cartoonist for the Bruguera publishing company, the sister started a career as an opera singer, while the younger brother appears not to have had any career at all, something which also requires talent. They always lived together and one of their interests was to recreate scenes from Westerns, which we assume they did in the non-urbanised areas around Barcelona. Rosita was a consummate horsewoman and the neighbourhood children used to be dazzled when they saw her appear unexpectedly, mounted on the back of a sleek horse. On their death, the hundreds of photos they took of these films with no audience, the scripts and stories they wrote, the recordings of their collaborations on the radio, as well as huge collections of comics and records, remained shut away and forgotten until the appearance of some unexpected heiresses: the film director Ione Atenea and her friends. When they entered the abandoned house, they began to suspect that there was a sense to those objects that had lost their owners. And so, as if it were a collage, Atenea composes a portrait of these individuals, who are not exactly unknown, and offers us two axioms as if they were stolen from a Western set: that horses die at daybreak and that, when someone wants to shoot a film, they always end up finding a way to do so.</p>

Mille cipressi (A Thousand Cypresses)

Luca Ferri

<p>&ldquo;The centimetre is arid.&rdquo; Mille cipressi is a short film in which we hear this strange remark and, when we hear it, it seems obvious to us. It is a film that is shot almost completely in a tomb. The Brion tomb. A tomb erected during the seventies, the work of the Venetian architect, Carlo Scarpa. A film in which we can also listen to a lecture delivered at a conference by Scarpa himself. A lecture in which there are remarks such as the one about the centimetre. Also remarks on materials. On construction problems. On the possibility of classicism in the present. And, also: &ldquo;If architecture is good, then the person listening to it and seeing it feels its benefits without realising it&rdquo;. This is a film in which, while hearing these remarks, we see details of the tomb, shot with the warmth and slightly myopic attention of the Super-8. We see light, water, lines, surfaces and openings. We see that the water is light and is surface. We see that, in its reflection, the water opens the surfaces and makes the lines dance. We see that, in this same way, the light traces lines and opens surfaces. We see triangular shapes, right angles and strange, broken circles. We see Scarpa&#39;s work, detail by detail, work of light and time, a beauty which we do not completely understand and yet in some way perhaps, we find beneficial. A beauty which makes us eager to be precise and attentive. And meanwhile, silently, humanly, a figure, also precise in its way, walks through this space.</p>

Saturn And Beyond

Declan Clarke

<p>In Saturn and Beyond, Declan Clarke recounts his early childhood, up until the closing down of the Irish Museum of Broadcasting founded by his father. It seeks to reflect upon the decline of our neurological functions as we seek to develop more rapid and pervasive means of communication through technology.</p>

FLORENCE

Beryl Korot

<p>I sit at my computer cutting up real time footage of waterfalls, snow storms, boiling water. I combine these to make threads of moving images. I look and listen to the result in front of me and I think of people whose actions transcend fear&mdash;not in a momentary instinctual way&mdash;but over a sustained period of time. The name Florence Nightingale comes to mind, a woman whose name has become a cliche but of whom I know so little. I order books of her writings from Amazon and select phrases spread over hundreds of pages to make a soliloquy or poem. We collaborate. Words float vertically down the screen with its own position, transparency and speed. A slow sense of reading, time and sound unfolds.</p>

Les Prières de Delphine (Delphine's Prayers)

Rosine Mbakam

<p>This film is the portrait of Delphine, a young Cameroonian girl. Like others, she belongs to the generation of young African women crushed by our patriarchal societies and abandoned to Western sexual colonization as her only means of survival. Through her courage and strength, she exposes these patterns of domination that continue to lock up African women.</p>

Narciso

Julio Fermepin

<p>The indigenous community of the Hornaditas lives in the well-known valley on the R&iacute;o Grande in the Argentinian province of Jujuy which provides access to the altiplano that is the Quebrada de Humahuaca. Narciso is in charge of the water the community uses and walks around the valley digging and checking irrigation channels. Julio Fermepin accompanies him with his 16mm camera, recording the intense colours of his days. What is a valley if not an oasis in the midst of so much aridity? Everything is exaggerated in this space, even the green of the apples, in a shot where you can sense their sweet tartness. Finding himself accompanied by the filmmaker, Narciso provides a small self-portrait in which he first shows all his typical things (llamas and cactuses, real and plastic flowers, dried corn to make flour, the Argentinean flag waving in the air). The atypical is yet to come when he begins to speak not to the filmmaker but to a future audience as if it were actually there, as if he was being followed around by a group of people. Narciso also sets his routes to music for us with ballads, carnavalitos and chacareras. At one point, he shares the story of his auto-stone, a machine with which to travel all over the world, like this film, and like the lyrics of this carnavalito by Tarate&ntilde;o Rojas: A letter you will receive, A portrait I will send you, But my person, You will never see.</p>

Baleh-baleh

Pascale Bodet

<p>I give a friend a tale to read. He leaves his house, walks across the countryside, repeats the tale to himself, and arrives at the sea. And so it was that a stonecutter, who became rich, then king, then sun, then cloud, then rock, became a stonecutter once again.</p>

Nenad

Mladen Bundalo

<p>After living in Belgium for 13 years, Mladen Bundalo still thinks of Bosnia as home. Is there an option which is neither leaving nor staying? Maybe it&#39;s going back home to shoot films from time to time, even if you do it in the language spoken in the country where you pay your taxes. Nenad is about options and versions, about the number 3, which they say is the lucky number. But luck is not the same everywhere. In Nenad, the chaos of Bosnia is explained in groups of three. Three languages, three ethnicities, three presidents. The third option between east and west, the diminished option. How lucky is the ham in a sandwich? The middle brother? A point that is neither A nor B? This film&rsquo;s quest is that of a third option which, if not superior, at least strikes a balance. While thinking what perhaps all migrants think, Bundalo meets Nenad, a 30-year-old man like himself who intends to emigrate to Slovenia. He spends time with him at home, at work (a train repair factory), in the bar and with his friends, who seem to belong to them both. What to do with the country that has befallen you? With the class that has befallen you, the time that has befallen you, which is one with no work, no family, no home, one made only of time to fill. Still and moving images coexist in the film, a distortion of time which is something like being and not being there, a coming and going which becomes a machine for constantly turning out memories for the future, which will continue to occur far away, in a country where the water is different and, so, as the Bosnians say, generates a disorder in the body like that in the photos, which is the origin of sorrow.</p>

Soy Libre (2021)

Laure Portier

<p>Arnaud, the director&rsquo;s brother, has always been tempestuous. The adults looked at him as if he was always screwing up and he ended up proving them right, embracing the expectation. For this film, it all started when Arnaud went to a closed educational center and Laure to the Institut Sup&eacute;rieur des Arts. She has been filming her brother ever since. Fifteen years and many difficult moments later, here is a film about, by and with Arnaud.</p>

untitled part 9: this time

Jayce Salloum

<p>Out of the mouths of rural boys, finding the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin in Afghanistan.</p>

Self-Portrait: 47 KM 2020

Zhang Mengqi

<p>The eleventh installment in Zhang Mengqi&#39;s self-portrait series patiently details the minutiae of daily life in the filmmaker&#39;s ancestral village during 2020.</p> <p>Over the past thirteen years, Zhang has documented her father&rsquo;s village in Hubei, China, as a repository of ancestral memory. The title of her ongoing series, &ldquo;Self-Portrait,&rdquo; suggests the degree of Zhang&rsquo;s awareness of filmmaking as an act that always implies a vital and intersubjective relation between the artist and the world&nbsp;to which she is connected. This tenth film,&nbsp;<em>47 KM 2020</em><em>,</em>&nbsp;carries that recognition to its logical endpoint, as Zhang opted to install herself permanently in the village after the outbreak of COVID-19. Filmed between early January and late December 2020, and divided into chapters corresponding to the Chinese lunisolar calendars&rsquo; 24 solar terms, this vivid account of a year in the life of a stoic community, far removed from an urban-centered pandemic, unfolds with the simultaneous vastness and fine detail of a classical Chinese handscroll painting. Featuring some of the most authentic pastoral scenes in any film, as well as some of the most delightful dialogues with children, Zhang&rsquo;s film is an immense accomplishment. Award of Excellence, 2023 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. (Museum of Moving Image)</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER

Vika Kirchenbauer

<p>This film constitutes an attempt at personal and self-reflective artistic criticism that considers contemporary art, both in its production and presentation, from a class perspective.</p>

918 GAU (918 noches)

Arantza Santesteban

<p>Arantza Santesteban is dictating into a voice recorder. She is recounting her recollections. The first: the day on which she was arrested for membership of an outlawed political party which supported Basque independence, at a time when open conversations were being held with ETA and some political parties with the intention of putting an end to the conflict. It was on 4th October 2007. 918 were the number of nights that she spent in prison. More than two and a half years. The recollections narrated by Santesteban are full of details: the pattern of a carpet, sweat, a desire to smile, to roar with laughter. The narrative is constructed in such a way that the spectator gets the feeling of experiencing the situation first-hand. The scenes of the filmmaker recording her voice and narrating fragments of her recollections are combined with different documents: the court order, photos, letters. The documents are scanned, as if they also had to go through a process in order to reach the present and serve to recollect. Santesteban&#39;s own voice accompanies these archival materials but we could say that it is a second voice. Different from the first one. The one on the recorder. This second voice establishes a necessary distance. Finally, the staged scenes: two women having sex, a girl dancing techno in a poorly lit discotheque, another girl walking through a wood, calling to the birds who land on her hands. Who are these women? Are they also part of Santesteban&#39;s recollection? Other lives that she may have had? Are all these personalities combined into one? The different film devices that come into play make up a fragmented film in which the director achieves something that has never done before: she addresses the issue of the Basque conflict from first-hand experience, transmitted from complexity and doubt. And, finally, the silence comes.</p>

To Pick a Flower

Shireen Seno

<p>&quot;During my investigation, I found the photo of a young bride posing outdoors for a portrait, but instead of the groom, a plant was by her side.&quot; A slightly broken voice-over describes the photo that we can see on screen. Indeed, a young girl in her wedding gown is posing alongside a plant. The next still shown is very similar to the first: another woman posing alongside another plant. However, this time, it is not so clear whether she is a bride. As in the first case, the voice-over once more describes the woman. These two photos are part of the archival photographs from the American colonial occupation of the Philippines from 1898 to 1946 and the voice is Shireen Seno&rsquo;s, the film director. Her voice accompanies the entire film, whose starting point is the interest in the relationship between plants and humans. Balete, Eucalyptus, Molave, Salingbobog, Tamarind. Different plants of the Philippines photographed, many at the side of a white settler dressed in white and &ldquo;similar to Kentucky Fried Chicken&rdquo;, in the words of the author. In other photos, beside the plants Philippine people are depicted with more humble clothing and always working. From her initial interest in the predatory attitude of human beings in relation to nature, the investigation gradually leads us to reflect on colonial capitalism in the Philippines and on photography itself. The filmmaker recounts how a friend told her that taking a photograph is like picking a flower. &quot;It&#39;s pretty and you&#39;d like to pick it but, at the same time, you&#39;re killing it. The camera allows us to cross this narrow line between life and death.&rdquo;</p>

Guerra (War)

Marta Ramos José Oliveira

<p>To which war does the title allude? The initial response would be the Portuguese colonial war in Africa (1961-1974), the one which has hit several generations who still live, dream, work and die in both geographies, and whose memory is still far from complete today. The anecdotes about that war which run around Portugal, the small or great traumatic stories which people tell or keep to themselves nourish the plot of this film, conceived, walked, talked and written by Jos&eacute; Lopes, its leading actor, along with Jos&eacute; Oliveira, who co-directed it with Marta Ramos. And who is, or rather who was Jos&eacute; Lopes? It&rsquo;s impossible not to wonder when you see Guerra. Few presences have been more intense and moving than his in cinema in recent years. To begin with, Jos&eacute; Lopes here is his character, Manuel, alias &ldquo;Manecas&rdquo;, a war veteran who lives, walks and dreams &mdash;nightmares more than anything&mdash; in Lisbon, who has a partner from whom he distances himself and a son who is better than him. He also has a mother, in the cemetery, whom he goes to see at night to recount the events of the day. And ghosts all around: his brothers in arms above all, the veterans he meets to eat, drink, sing and cry, all present though not all alive anymore. But there is a second meaning to that same title, a meaning which points to the permanence of all wars: yesterday&rsquo;s wars, today&rsquo;s wars, every day&rsquo;s wars. Ones which have nothing to do with Manecas but with Z&eacute; Lopes and with everyone. These are the wars for which the film reserves its darkness and its crudest light, the ones that it condenses, structures, elides, symbolises, spatialises, temporalises. Ana, the psychologist, says it in one of the most extraordinary sequences of the film, all overlapping words and images, while we listen to coffee filtering (coffee!): &ldquo;You fled to Africa, you got on a boat, months and months, you killed, you saw people die... And did you come back a changed man? You died a thousand times, they killed you a thousand times, you killed a thousand times... Salazar? The blacks? The world? The money? You?&rdquo;</p>

Film balkonowy (The Balcony Movie)

Paweł Łoziński

<p>People are passing by in the street under the balcony of Pawel Łoziński&#39;s home in Warsaw. A few walk calmly, others hurry along, some simply wander around. They may be taking a stroll with their sons and daughters, late for work or an appointment, returning home tired out, or taking their pets out. All these people are at different times in their life, with different desires, aims and goals, each with their own particular view of existence, some have reflected on this more than others. This Polish filmmaker (who already took part in the Official Section of Punto de Vista in 2009 with the film Kici, Kici) watches the passers-by from up on his balcony and decides to interrupt their walk and ask them a few questions. Entrenched on his balcony for more than two years, Łoziński&#39; dedicated his time to approaching his neighbours, complete strangers and even his own wife and asking them point blank questions about the meaning of life. We listen to their unexpected replies, intimate declarations, banalities, philosophical reflections and even some insults. There are some very fleeting appearances and also recurring characters, and all of them weave a tapestry of human experiences, building up small stories that sometimes rhyme and interact. While remaining in one place, Film balkonowy focuses on getting to know others through the camera, in some way thanks to the camera itself, highlighting the power of the cinema to bring us closer to others. An illuminating film, light at times and serious at others, a film that looks outwards, precisely at a time when we have shut ourselves away from the world.</p>

Evangelio mayor (Greater Gospel)

Javier Codesal

<p>Evangelio mayor is almost entirely shot in the building which was being renovated in Madrid between 2019 and 2020 to house the Josete Massa LGTBIQ+ public residential care home for the elderly, the first of its kind in the world. The film takes advantage of the site under transformation to stage two things. The first is the lucid and harsh testimony of Ram&oacute;n Barreiro, struck by AIDS in the early eighties and a survivor after many years of struggle and serious aftereffects. The second, a series of dialogues taken from the four Gospels (especially John&#39;s), in which elderly members of the LGTBIQ+ community cite &ldquo;the old words anew and in a new way&rdquo;, as one of the notices which can be read at the beginning of the film states. These brief scenes, a succession of frames which translate, paraphrase or gloss many of the episodes from the Gospels are designed to be &ldquo;innocent among the innocent, blasphemous for the Pharisaic&rdquo;. Provocation is by no means the primary intention behind showing them; nor are they composed of irony. Rather, the film understands that the biblical text, as the basis for rituals and stories shared by generations, is a vast framework or grand code which can be harnessed dramatically. This is what happens in Evangelio mayor, where the episodes from the Gospel serve to symbolise content which is as anti-doctrinal as the experience of life and death of LGTBIQ+ people, and particularly of the most vulnerable among them, the elderly. &ldquo;Thou art a Man, God is no more, thy own humanity learn to adore,&quot; William Blake wrote in The Everlasting Gospel two hundred and fifty years ago. The people we see, hear and feel with materialised sensuality in Evangelio mayor go even further than Blake, for they urge us to admire the vivacity of their bodies and the warmth of their words beyond an incomplete adoration of the species and its timeworn genders.</p>

Minamata Mandala

Hara Kazuo

<p>An epic tale of struggle and commitment. Shot over 15 years, Hara Kazuo&rsquo;s film documents the arduous legal and medical battles endured by the residents of Minamata, a city in southern Japan whose name has become synonymous with the infamous neurological disease. Sixty years since industrial wastewater from a chemical factory caused an outbreak of severe mercury poisoning, Minamata patients and their families continue to fight for legal recognition and compensation.</p>

The Stone Bridge

Artur-Pol Camprubí

<p>A woman witnesses the birth of a horse in the stable where she works &ndash; an image so strong that it continues to haunt her.</p> <p>On the edge of a town in Aragon, Spain a streetlamp flickers on, heralding the coming night and marking the limits of the settlement. In a stable a foal struggles to free itself from the amniotic sac. Angelica, a Romanian woman living in the village witnesses the birth. The little creature&rsquo;s struggle to free itself, its condition of ghostly and borderline existence, pierce her to the extent that she will be unable to shake off the image. Taking its title from an old Romanian song, this film is an enchanted work of beauty, revelling in the liminal space it creates.</p>

No hay regreso a casa (There is No Way Back Home)

Yaela Gottlieb

<p>Robert and Yaela, the director of the film. Father and daughter. He&rsquo;s in Peru, and she&rsquo;s in Buenos Aires. At the age of 25, Yaela is combining her search for work with investigation into her father&#39;s past. The film is a series of conversations which reveal an antagonistic ideology. Robert&#39;s mother emigrated to Israel after spending three years in Auschwitz during World War II and seeing the growth of anti-Semitism in Oradea, her home town in Romania. Robert is a Zionist. His daughter seems to want to reconstruct her father&#39;s past to continue conversing. &ldquo;Is Judaism a nationality? Is there more than one kind of Zionism? Are they like the gypsies? Are we like the gypsies? Is Ben Gurion a hero or a war criminal? Are Israeli Arabs Palestinians? What is a secular state? What does it mean to be Jewish? Just a religion? What is Zionism? Does Zionism segregate? Can you be a Jew without being a Zionist?&rsquo; Yaela has a lot of questions.</p>

Charm Circle

Nira Burstein

<p>Charm is the power to please or delight, but it can also be a talisman, an amulet to bring good luck (like the breakfast cereal, a lucky charm). Charm Circle is also a place in New York, a part of Queens. The entire Burstein family, three daughters and their parents, once lived in a house there; a very charming family, although their fate has been somewhat more complex. As Fabi&aacute;n Casas wrote: everything that rots forms a family. This film both supports and counters such an idea, focussing as much on the dysfunctional present of this group of people as it does on the converging lines of their past which have taken the form of a debacle. The Bursteins are about to lose their house to the bank. The bank, as always in American movies (and life), is the owner of everything. And so Charm Circle is a melodrama which knows that real life also comes from a long tradition of family melodramas in which the house, as it falls, tries to take its inhabitants along with it. It&#39;s also a musical, so as everything collapses, resistance sings. Between intimate conversations in the form of interviews and records of a past in which everything was new and worked, the film advances with its storylines. On the one hand the bank, on the other the wedding. One of the daughters is about to get married, a new family emerges from a polyamorous marriage of three. In the midst of it all, the eldest of the sisters, Nira (that midpoint between five people) puts together this catharsis-exorcism, a meticulously constructed home video dedicated to the entire world from her rotunda, in which her entire family is like the characters from a sitcom who have grown too quickly, and all the acidity which comes with old wit lays bare not just the deepest frustration but also the warmest sweetness.</p>