Punto De Vista Film Festival 2017

Cicha Symfonia (A Silent Symphony)

Aitor Gametxo

The unpronounceable Wroclaw, Breslavia in Poland, city of changing borders, is now, like all cities, the scene of noise and melodies that deaf people are unaware of. However, the movements they make with their hands, chests and faces are merged each day with these urban rhythms that we are privileged to witness. Throughout a day, we are witness to an extraordinary silent symphony made up of visual rhymes, conversations, everyday moments, childhood emotions and pleasures that normally go unnoticed, but here they are rediscovered in the most comfortable of silences. It is a symphonic portrait of a resoundingly familiar city.

Cidade Pequena (Small Town)

Diogo Costa Amarante

When six-year-old Frederico finds out at school that people die when their hearts stop beating, he is unable to sleep that night. The next day, his mother asks the teacher once again: Must children always be told the truth? Always? In great, colourful tableaux, Diogo Costa Amarante illustrates the emotional world of Frederico and his mother. The framing of the pictures recalls the attention to detail present in paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Amarante's eclectic narrative refers to his own subjective attitude towards narrative itself: "Words don't come easy, to me, how can I find a way, to make you see, I love you".

colombi

luca ferri

A couple of lovers lives together an entire century of life while objects, trends, movies at the movie theatre and architects follow one another in a slow but inexorable decline towards the horror.
Their obsession with the octagonal knobs of the coffeemakers and with the anonymous design objects will accompany them along the passing by of the decades.
Aging and gradually losing their force, but never the clarity of mind to accept this decline, they finally decide to exclude the world, darkening and sealing the shutters of their home and withdrawing into themselves, leafing through the pages of old encyclopedias of extinct animals.

Foyer

Ismaïl Bahri

Tunis "observed" through the surprising filter of a blank sheet of paper placed just a few centimetres from the lens, whose shape changes in colour with the vibration of the wind and the sun light and covers the vision, hiding the external image, but not its sound. Guided by intuition, the camera becomes the main attraction for passers-by, children and the local authorities. "Why are you filming like that? What is the message?" a passer-by asks. "I don't think there is one", replies the filmmaker, who hands over a risky slide that best reflects the reality and the turbulent social context of his country paradoxically by hiding it. Risk and luck to "show" a stroll through today's Tunis with its fears and dreams in the foreground.

From Vincent's House in the Borinage

José Fernandes

The reading of a letter addressed to his brother, Theo, is the metaphoric starting point of this suggestive immersion into the work and places inhabited by Vincent Van Gogh at a key moment in his artistic life, when he abandoned his faith to rediscover the world of painting in the Belgian mining town of Borinage. A strange presence enters the house where he lived, recreates his studio, breathes his surroundings and travels the landscapes to merge with his own paintings, pure oil images that take the shape of a mysterious and elusive dream like the great Dutch maestro.

Green Screen Gringo

Douwe Dijkstra

It is dawn in Sao Paulo, but today is not just any old day. On this occasion, we don't see the streets of Brazil from the tourist's point of view. Reality is presented in a new way before our eyes. A green screen opens up through the crowd to reveal the contrasts of a country that is going through political upheaval, but never loses its passion for music, art and pace of life. A chroma transported by hand is used to allow us to dominate at least a piece of reality. The result is a reflection that is as bold and committed to Brazilian society as a protest song to the rhythm of samba.

Kino Otok (Islands Of Forgotten Cinemas)

Ivan Ramljak

A poetic documentary about the lost film culture in small villages on Croatian islands, during the second half of the last century. Six witnesses of the time are remembering their favorite films and events related to their viewing and screening experiences, which marked their lives.

L'Abcdaire de l'amoureuse d'un photographe (The ABC of Being in Love with a Photographer)

Anahit Simonian

How to film a word? How to listen to a photograph? How to tell of a love life in just 26 words? How to put what does not fit into life in a dictionary? In the celebration of what we call beauty, Anahit Simonian, fascinated by the oneiric universe of the French photographer, Guillaume Poussou, picks up a camera for the first time in her life – she is a composer – and documents the rhythm of the creative process and the melodies of a reflection on the photographic beat: systole for the reason portrayed, diastole for her visual sensation. Reality fragmented by letters, art encapsulated in voices, numbering and listing as the best container for what moves us.

5 October / 5. október

Martin Kollar

Facing a life or death operation, a man who don't speaks to us on screen and who all we know about him is that he is called Ján, flees away and escapes with the only companion of his bicycle. His destination: inland Slovakia, where he lives surrounded by animals and where he becomes a hermit trying to assimilate what could be his final days. His other destination: his inner self, is presented to us through the pages of a fatal diary that advances like a countdown, like the lump on his neck, with a date marked in red: 5th October, the day of the operation. Ján writes down ingenious memories, photographs and experiences that we witness in silence, in mystical respiration with nature, unknowingly featuring an optimistic, wordless parable and the big question is what will he note down on what has been marked as his final day.

Converso

David Arratibel

A film about a church organ, family, harmony and something even more difficult: faith. Concepts that are more or less basic through which there is an attempt to explain something so profound as it is ineffable: the director's sisters suddenly convert to Catholicism and the filmmaker tries to grasp what is behind this personal transformation mechanism. Intelligently dismounting the classic format of the interview documentary (don't forget the title's play on words, Converso also comes from the verb to converse), the director sits on a chair that becomes a confessional of others and his own, asking questions in front of a mirror that is none other than the mirror of the house. It is a family film with a personal search and a huge cinematographic question: If the Holy Spirit enters our home, is it possible to make a film on it?

Europe, She Loves

Jan Gassmann

Can love survive in a Europe that has been severely hit by the global economic crisis? To find out the answer, we look at the inner landscape of diverse European cities, from Dublin to Seville and from Thessaloniki to Tallinn, where four young couples expose their feelings to the rhythm of their bodies, giving in to passion to overcome their differences and daily woes, those of a society on the edge. The radio and television brings the echo of the film, a deaf shower of political decisions taken off-camera, alien to this generation that resists, hanging on to their uncertain promises of future in the microcosms of their bedrooms.

Maa sisälläni (Land Within)

Jenni Kivistö

It is a bridge-film that crosses an immense ocean on a sensorial journey to one of the most unusual regions on the planet. The native Wayuu live in the La Guajira Desert, located between the extreme north of Colombia and Venezuela. They do not consider themselves to be citizens of either of the two countries. Through an observational staging, the Finnish filmmaker also begins to question her own country and this is when she feels a strange connection and discovers that the word "maa" means "land" in Wayyu and in her native Finnish. With her poetic look and the form of a horizontal epistle, the film breaks the moulds of the classic anthropological film that describes a far-off tribe. Here, there is at least a return journey which deletes both directions, when the land is land, here and there.

Normální autisticky film (Normal Autistic Film)

Miroslav Janek

Direct and thoughtful, Luka has a distinctive sense of humor; he loves movies and he writes his own screenplays. Piano virtuoso Denis is able to play demanding classical pieces; he is also incredibly intelligent and well-read. He adores The Little Prince so much that he keeps rereading it. Majda likes to rap and isn't shy about it; her bold lyrics expose the surrounding world with disarming accuracy. Marjamka is able to tell long stories in English, while her tireless brother Ahmed is uncommonly friendly. Five remarkable children that society has consistently and unflatteringly labeled "autistic." A foremost Czech documentarist with a unique authorial vision challenges us once and for all to stop perceiving autism as a medical diagnosis and try to understand it as a fascinating way of thinking that's often maddeningly difficult to decipher. Because who's to determine what's normal – living in a constant rush while disregarding the absurdity of modern life, or wistfully seeking order, peace and tranquility in the world?

The Host

Miranda Pennell

Like a photo album that gains its own life, the film advances in a fixed image, masterfully telling a tale. The Host combines the filmmaker's personal memory with collective memory and shows the trick of a well armed matryoshka doll: how a family film can contain a whole country as well as a search for a personal mirror in which oneself is reflected. The Host houses several films. Using the keys of essay film, the director delves into the past of her parents as former British Petroleum workers in Iran. The investigation reveals the other side of the country and takes the form of a huge international allegation. Finally, Miranda Pennell's invitation is firm: she forces the spectator to look behind the image, to unveil the other side of the photographs and the scanned personal belongings that she comes across until she finally finds herself, without any possible distance between the official and the private story.

La deuxième nuit (The Second Night)

Eric Pauwels

A film made with wet eyes from beginning to end. Following the death of his mother, the filmmaker, Eric Pauwels, dedicates this heartfelt love letter in the form of a film to her, aware of the fact that the world has changed totally following her disappearance: his own world but also the outside world. Through the images that he keeps of her, everyday objects and childhood memories, attention is taken back to their mother-child relationship. Poetic evocation is the best mechanism for remembering. Guided by ephemeral feelings and literary quotations, we are given an intimate diary in which his family file, staging and domestic images are combined to wisely reflect on how to learn to look at our world through the eyes of those who are no longer with us.

Treblinka

Sérgio Tréfaut

A film about the Holocaust? A film about trains? A film about both things in which the playwright and film go hand in hand in Sérgio Tréfaut's latest proposal. Voices in the night, trains in the fog, naked bodies in the railway wagons that travel across the east of Europe guided by the ghosts of the Nazi extermination. Two questions: if the Holocaust can be told in a different way, perhaps it is because everything is never told. And secondly: if poetry existed during Auschwitz, perhaps it can also exist afterwards. Travellers with a single destination, Treblinka Camp, in the north-west of Poland, without a return ticket, lo terrible. The present, past and future are merged in the image that trembles during its exploration of the Nazi horror and reverberates in the personal testimonies with their fascinating dramatization in the first person.

We Make Couples

Mike Hoolboom

Resistance, desire, capitalism. Everything is put through Canadian-born Mike Hoolboom's blender in this film that sums up the beginning of our century in a brilliant film essay proposal. Edited over six years, we are faced with a lucid reflection in the form of a collage on the art of producing images, with the echoes of the cinema-going and the social turmoil of the Occupy movement to Pussy Riot. The editing, like roulette, plays on the free association of visual ideas, in which all types of materials from diverse sources are combined (black and white, 16mm, animation). The result goes beyond any logical narrative and invites us on a journey to the centre of the sub-conscience of the film itself, where the arms try to invert the logic of the market: images to digest, not to consume.