Punto De Vista Film Festival 2011

Talking Heads (Muslim Women)

Fathima Nizaruddin

<p>The film is a satirical response to the way mainstream media constructs the identity of Muslim women as homogenous &ldquo;victims&rdquo;. Through Z, the &ldquo;friendly voice of God&rdquo; narrator, the film looks at the filmmaker and her &lsquo;documentary efforts&rsquo; with a fair amount of cynicism. The film reveals how the subjectivity of the filmmaker influences the film in such a way that the film is as much about its maker as it is about the subject.</p>

On Rubiks' Road

Laila Pakalnina

<p>Visual rhymes, resonant rhymes and a very precise editing in a film that is secretly politic, visual and fascinating sound wise. A road in Latvia, pedestrians, children, and several stations that go around, dance, and walk close to a still very recent past. The entire world fits onto a single bicycle road.</p>

Into the Middle of Nowhere

Anna Ewert

<p>In an outdoor nursery based in the woods, children create their own individually constructed worlds and can test out the boundaries of reality. The beauty and the challenges of growing up become visible in the way they perceive their environment and interact with each other. A dry log and a bunch of branches become a plane that will take off to an unknown land. The woods become the place where the normal rules and regulations of society come to a halt and where the children transform the surroundings with their play into magic.</p>

El Maná

Juan Carrascal-Ynigo

<p>Jorge is concerned about globalization. Jorge is concerned about transnational flows. Jorge is worried about his little pubshop &ldquo;El Man&aacute;&rdquo;. But Jorge, a genuine Way&uacute;u, is not going to miss the chances caused by the new situation and he will do everything he can to make sure prosperity arrives to his hometown Jeripa.</p>

Crosswalk

Jeanne Liotta

<p>Jeanne Liotta, whose former film Observando el cielo was internationally acclaimed, filmed with her Super 8 camera the rituals of her catholic neighbors living at the Lower East Side in Manhattan during Easter. Crosswalk reveals those images and sounds and becomes a fascinating work of experimental urban Anthropology. This is genuine realism from New York.</p>

Vrindavana

Ernesto Baca

<p>Vrindavana is a little town in the north of India. But Vrindavana is also a state of mind, a dimension of love and brotherhood. On a film where audiovisual perception prevails through a sensorial narrative, Ernesto Baca makes a journey that is more spiritual than physical. The film is understood as a mental state, the images open a door to the unknown, and the audio is a bridge that leads us to some other place.</p>

True Love

Ion de Sosa

<p>Ion used to live in Berlin. Ion used to live with his girlfriend Marta. Ion had two cameras, a 16 mm one and a video camera. And Ion used to film the little world around him with them: his room, his flatmates, his girlfriend, a pub, his tattoos, and many streets. But one day Marta broke up with Ion. The same places but now without her; the same house, now empty.</p>

The Arbor

Clio Barnard

<p>A housing project in Northern England known as The Arbor left an indelible impression on playwright Andrea Dunbar. She grew up there, named her first play after it, and based all of her subsequent work there. Director Clio Barnard could have adapted Dunbar&#39;s play The Arbor for the screen or made a conventional documentary on her life, but instead she has crafted a captivating and truly unique work that transcends genre and defies categorization. After spending two years conducting audio interviews with Dunbar&#39;s family, friends, and neighbors, Barnard filmed actors lip-synching the interviews, flawlessly interpreting every breath, tick, and nuance. Barnard&#39;s film focuses in particular on the playwright&#39;s troubled relationship with her daughter Lorraine. Dunbar died tragically in 1990 at age 29; Barnard connects with Lorraine&mdash;now age 29 herself&mdash;to reintroduce her to her mother&#39;s plays and private letters, prompting her to reflect on the parallels between their lives.</p>

Histoire racontée par Jean Dougnac (Story Told by Jean Dougnac)

Noëlle Pujol

<p>In the confined space of a bedroom, an old man lying on his bed has been waiting for me for thirty years. He has a secret and is dying to reveal it. I set my camera at the foot of the bed. It is not an interview, but a polyphonic monologue in one long static shot. Juggling with two tongues, French and Occitan, Jean Dougnac tells me the story of my parents, from whom I was separated at birth. A family tragedy is about to be exposed. But it is only the background to other cinematographic and political stories, other lives in motion, explored through words.</p>

Make It New John

Duncan Campbell

<p>This film could be the unofficial counterpart of Back to the Future. The underside of the futuristic car driven by Michael J. Fox in the 1985 film. It could also be the apocryphal story of the crisis of modern capitalism. Born the son of an immigrant Romanian foundry worker, John DeLorean&rsquo;s natural talent for engineering placed him at the top of General Motors. He persuaded the British Government to back a venture, building a factory in Belfast to produce a new sports car. DeLorean&rsquo;s attempts to keep the factory open became increasingly desperate and corrupt and he was eventually arrested by the FBI. The factory, which employed 2,000 workers, closed a few years later, having produced just over 9,000 cars. Duncan Campbell&rsquo;s film fuses original footage from the 1980s with 16mm re-enactments and documentary-style interviews to produce a masterful exploration of work alienation, economic crisis, and documentary approaches.</p>

Grawitacja byla wtedy wszedzie (Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then)

Brent Green

<p>Leonard and Mary meet in a car crash. They fall instantly in love, and live happily ever after&hellip;until Mary gets sick. Desperate to save her, Leonard decides that if he builds a house for Mary, it will heal her. Leonard loves Mary so much he builds a house to save her life. Self-taught animator Brent Green built a town, a moon and stars to make a film about their love and our myths. Inspired by the real actions of the eccentric Leonard Wood, filmmaker and musician Brent Green brings to life this love story like no other in his first feature-length film. Shot entirely on the full-scale town he built in his backyard, Green combines animation, stop-motion and live-action in an ethereal opus to lovers and tinkerers everywhere.</p>

Foreign Parts

Véréna Paravel J.P. Sniadecki

<p>A hidden enclave in the shadow of the New York Mets&#39; new stadium, the neighbourhood of Willets Point is an industrial zone fated for demolition. Filled with scrapyards and auto salvage shops, lacking sidewalks or sewage lines, the area seems ripe for urban development. But Foreign Parts discovers a strange community where wrecks, refuse and recycling form a thriving commerce. Cars are stripped, sorted and catalogued by brand and part, then resold to an endless parade of drive-thru customers. But even more fascinating than the business itself, are the characters that are around. Joe, the last original resident, rages and rallies through the street like a lost King Lear, trying to contest his imminent eviction. Two lovers, Sara and Luis, struggle for food and safety through the winter while living in an abandoned van. Julia, the homeless queen of the junkyard, exalts in her beatific visions of daily life among the forgotten. The film observes and captures the struggle of a contested &quot;eminent domain&quot; neighbourhood before its disappearance under the capitalization of New York&#39;s urban ecology.</p>

Erie

Kevin Jerome Everson

<p>Two men draping a tattered billboard with a hip new ad. A young girl silently focusing on a candle. Two men sword-fighting. A group of workers discussing the past and present of local industry. Singers and dancers in their practice sessions. Immigrants and forms of immigration. Gestures, tasks, and living conditions in 16mm black-and-white shots. An oblique realism to tell the experiences of working-class African-Americans in the US, from south to north. Work and leisure. Gestures, routines, and special moments. This film is a reflection on the ways of living of African-American communities near lake Erie.</p>

Ici-bas (Down Here)

Comes Chahbazian

<p>We are in Yerevan, Armenia. It&acute;s a city, a country always in constant change, where yesterday&acute;s monuments are tomorrow&acute;s ruins. We are in Yerevan, where some children play and fight in the street. We are in Yerevan, but we can hardly see bits and pieces, like an intermittent jigsaw, like lost fragments of a country that is impossible to portrait in its entirety. We are in Yerevan, a chaotic and incomplete world.</p>

Color perro que huye (Colour Runaway Dog)

Andrés Duque

<p>The film starts with a revealing note by Duque: &ldquo;I have no celluloid or videotapes. I have only numbers stored on hard drives and in the form of memory boxes called QuickTime. From it, I extracted images &ndash; now put together - ordered and presented with sincerity. Although, truth, are not&quot;. After an accident that leaves him in bed for two months, the director recovers images and footage that he has filed for eight years. With them he produced a film intimate and sensorial, consisting of portraits of friends, walking tours around Barcelona and a trip to his country of birth, Venezuela, where chaos imposes its aesthetic appeal. A complex and fragmented film that shows us the world closest to its filmmaker, even though they are not far from being as dreamlike as a picture by Hyeronimous Bosch.</p>

Alda (失憶日記)

Viera Čákanyová

<p>The main character in this film has Alzheimer&rsquo;s. Instead of giving up, she stands up to it. First, she gives it a name, as if it were a stranger who has come to her life. She calls it &ldquo;Alda.&rdquo; Then, she devises a scheme to remember her daily routine: she will record her daily activities so that she can go back to the images when the disease gets worse. The problem emerges when the images she herself has recorded force her to face a past she does not want to accept. Or is her forgetful present that is the real problem? An intimate portrait, Alda is a metaphor of the erasure of the past in former Communist countries.</p>

48

Susana de Sousa Dias

<p>For 48 years, the Salazar dictatorship held Portugal in its grip. To show us its true face, Susana de Sousa Dias needs only to show the dossier photos of political prisoners&mdash;accompanied by the voices of these men and women recalling the period. The Carnation Revolution of 1974 brought liberation. &ldquo;Life returned to normal,&rdquo; explains one of the former prisoners, &ldquo;What&rsquo;s left is the bad memory of the things you experienced and that you will never get out of your head.&rdquo;<br /> <br /> The former prisoners recall memories of arrests and years spent in captivity, of violence, torture, and humiliation; of disgust and outrage, and their only possible form of resistance was to remain silent and to own the way they stared down the camera of the secret police. There&rsquo;s just a single smile to be seen, one that the person concerned now looks back on with mixed feelings.<br /> <br /> De Sousa Dias&rsquo; stripped-back form makes for lucid and powerful storytelling, with the portraits and personal recollections combining to evoke the regime of terror established under Salazar. A powerfully eloquent and multi-award-winning minimalist documentary.</p>

Edwin (Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet's Alzheimer)

Alan Berliner

<p>Alan Berliner has been chronicling the final years of his friend, cousin, and former mentor, Edwin Honig &ndash; distinguished poet, translator, critic, and teacher &ndash; into the depths of Alzheimer&#39;s disease. Among many other honors, Honig received honorary &quot;knighthoods&rdquo; from Spain and Portugal for his seminal translations of Lorca, Calder&oacute;n, and Pessoa that awakened English-speaking readers to the work of these literary giants. This suite of six short films reveals a poet and wordsmith who may have lost his memory and his command of language, but still retains his sense of rhythm, rhyme and sublime musicality. And through it all, his dignity.</p>