Punto De Vista Film Festival 2015

Before We Go

Jorge León

<p>Brussels, La Monnaie Opera House. Three actors working there meet three people near the end of their lives, and together they go backstage of the great Belgian Opera House on a journey through its most secret corners. They rehearse a play that we will never see. Three portraits on the threshold of death, without the need to step onto the main stage, tell of the tragedy of the body and the transfiguration by art.</p>

El hombre congelado

Carolina Campo

<p>A silent film in which the unexplainable need to get lost is the only announcement. Sailing on a vessel of the Uruguay Armada, a group of soldiers see their life consumed by the risk and tiredness. Their destination is the Antarctic and hence they are crossing the frozen ocean to deliver supplies to a scientific base. Their journey, often interrupted by icebergs, is long and full of danger. The final stop of the slow crossing lies in abstraction.</p>

Traces

Diego Gutiérrez Danniel Danniel

<p>A solitary man and an unknown death. There is no funeral, nor any friends or relatives to answer for him. A municipal service will be responsible for taking and destroying all of the possessions found in his house if nobody turns up in a few days. There is a protocol for these nameless deaths, a kind of impasse in which the anonymous corpses are still alive awaiting a response to this question: Do we really die at the time of death or when people forget about us? The filmmakers and their friends enter into the dead man&rsquo;s house before this final verdict is fulfilled and they discover themselves through the deceased&rsquo;s belongings and in the lives that are still buried.</p>

Le complexe de la salamandre (The Salamander Complex)

Stéphane Manchematin Serge Steyer

<p>A glass frame, some wax wings, a tale sculpted in dust on the glass, a mask of bees wings. The artist, Patrick Neu lives alone in a remote island village to the north of the Vosges, far from all of the central focal points of the world of art. He creates slowly and carefully with the patience inherited from the primitive Flemish artists, which whom he dialogues explicitly in works that border the ephemeral and tend towards a rare perfection. One day, the director of the Tokyo Palace in Paris pays him a visit: after following his work for fifteen years, he wants to commission him with his first individual exhibition. He accepts but will not change his method in any way. In the background, the old truth of the salamander, above all, an artist should be able to hide and keep his mystery.</p>

Letters to Max

Eric Baudelaire

<p>Abkhazia is a kind of paradox: a country that exists in the physical sense of the word:, a territory with borders, a government, a flag and its own language. But at the same time, it lacks legal existence as it was not recognised by any other nation for its first 20 years. Therefore, Abkhazia exists without existing, trapped in a space between realities. The filmmaker decides to send letters to this ghost place without including via Georgia on the address &ndash; the former nation to which it belonged. Only the Republic of Abkhazia appears on the envelope and, like a bottle thrown into the sea, the letters mysteriously start to arrive and are answered giving rise to an epistolary film on the impossible.</p>

Lettres du Voyant

Louis Henderson

<p>Lettres du Voyant is a documentary-fiction about spiritism and technology in contemporary Ghana, which attempts to uncover some truths about a mysterious practice called &quot;Sakawa&quot; &mdash; internet scams mixed with voodoo magic. Tracing back the scammers&rsquo; stories to the times of Ghanaian independence, the film proposes Sakawa as a form of anti-neocolonial resistance.</p>

Mambo Cool

Chris Gude

<p>The night extends its labyrinth of darkness. There, each person is the living dead. A group of characters wander through a city that we cannot see, playing themselves: drug addicts, prostitutes, cheats and other shady inhabitants. The credits are full of alias rather than names and surnames. Theatre filmed in a brief but intense fall to hell, where delirium and sordidness live and dance to the rhythm of mambo.</p>

Baladna alraheeb (Our Terrible Country)

Mohammad Ali Atassi Ziad Homsi

<p>Trapped between the terrorism of the official State and the Islamic State, a Syrian intellectual and a young Syrian photographer try to escape from a country that is crumbling. The former, Yassin Haj Saleh, had his passport taken from him decades ago and hence the possibility to leave the country legally; the latter, Ziad Homsi, has just exchanged the rifle with which he fought against Assad for a camera. For him, Yassin is an image of another Syria, for which he is willing to risk his life at all costs. There is a 32 year age difference between the intellectual and the young rebel, but their flight from the demons of their country bring them together.</p>

Sud Eau Nord déplacer (South to North)

Antoine Boutet

<p>The world&rsquo;s largest water crossing project, the Nan Shui Bei Diao, is the core of this film that crosses China from south to north like travelling across an enormous open wound. An epic film that alternates the interview with observation, the tense camera sequences in which government delegates intimidate the protestors, with untypical images of the result of a geographical transformation that tends towards megalomania: cement creates a landscape of science fiction that leaves green in the memory, taking rivers to invented courses and turns deserts into beautiful forests. The filmmaker wonders about the implications of the colossal project for the inhabitants, whilst its course is taken back to the conflictive epicentre in Tibet.</p>

Helgad vare denna plats (Blessed Be This Place)

Carl Olsson

<p>A woman in front of a window, a female choir, a gymnast, two girls on a bench on a cold street, two crematorium workers exchanging banalities. A film made up of routine spaces which are sewn together to make a map of an unusual, familiar yet baffling city. Portrait of a place blessed by the perplexity of what we call daily life.</p>

Echo Chamber (2014)

Guillermo Moncayo

<p>An impending storm is announced through the public speakers of a tropical city in &ldquo;Echo Chamber&rdquo;</p>

OUT

Joan Antúnez

<p>In OUT, a film shot during a professional tennis tournament in Barcelona, the stars are those who are behind the court lines, almost invisible to the television. The result is a film of elimination, of images that are also OUT but which serve to tell the story of the same match but from an unusual angle. Tennis without tennis players.</p>

Rainbow’s Gravity

Mareike Bernien Kerstin Schroedinger

<p>Halfway between industrial poem and video-dance, Rainbow&rsquo;s Gravity imagines a staging that conjugates the verb to reveal in all of its meanings to explain the Agfacolor-Neu, a colour photographic film produced in Nazi Germany. The film seeks the reverse shot of what has been filmed and unravels the propaganda and psychological implications of that material. The film is portrayed with the same palate of colours and is screened in the same abandoned former line of production. It puts film in the cube. It is a film to show what that film showed us.</p>

Solo te puedo mostrar el color (I Can Only Show You the Color)

Fernando Vílchez Rodríguez

<p>An elliptic tale traces a route towards a silenced trauma, a film that tells more with what it hides that what it shows. We are in the north of Peru, on the same mountainsides as Herzog&rsquo;s Fitzcarraldo, and the government has betrayed its agreements with the Awajun natives, handing over their lands to a mining company. A tale of violence that includes all ingredients: chaos, lies and silence. Based on this, a filmmaker attempts to recompose the tale of what happened through complementary slides.</p>

Super Unit (2014)

Teresa Czepiec

<p>Superjednostka (Polish for Superunit) is a huge block of flats designed as a &quot;housing machine&quot;. Up to three thousand people can live on 15 floors of the building. The lifts only stop every three floors so the residents must go through a maze of corridors and stairs in order to get to their flats. The main characters of the documentary are people living in Superjednostka and going through important moments of their lives there. This is where their emotions throb, their expectations engender, and their desires come true... or not. 762 flat doors and 762 stories. We are opening only a few of them.</p> <p><em>Produced by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/wajdaschool">Wajda Studio</a></em></p>

The Blazing World

Jessica Bardsley

<p>A troubling relationship arose between the character played by Winona Ryder in the film&nbsp;Girl, Interrupted, the genuine depression experienced by the actress, and the shoplifting of which she was accused. Consisting entirely of clips from existing films, this video essay, which ultimately turns out to be profoundly personal, explores the possible links between depression and kleptomania.</p>