Punto De Vista Film Festival 2007

Más allá del espejo (Beyond the Mirror)

Joaquim Jordà

<p>What is reality? Is it what we see, and exactly as we see it, or is it what exists, but we cannot see it? A simple malfunction of the brain, agnosia, or a misdiagnosed case of meningitis can produce significant variations in the perception of the real world. Starting with a newspaper article, Joaquim Jord&agrave; began what would be his last documentary, in which he and other people with cerebral agnosia talk about their daily lives.</p>

Goodbye, America

Sergio Oksman

<p>Do you remember the grumpy Grandpa Munster? A descendant of Dracula, the character slept in a coffin, possessed the memory of the world, and occasionally projected the home movies he&#39;d filmed when Columbus discovered America. Al Lewis, the actor who played Grandpa, still makes a living as a vampire, and at over ninety years old, he also possesses the memory of the entire 20th century. Just a few months before he died, the character and the actor looked into each other&#39;s eyes and spoke.</p>

Elegía de Moscú / Moskovskaya elegiya (The Moscow Elegy)

Alexander Sokurov

<p>Sokurov intended to give this film to Tarkovsky for his fiftieth birthday, but due to the prohibitions and misgivings of the Soviet regime and Tarkovsky&#39;s untimely death, it became a posthumous documentary about his mentor. The film takes us to the places where the director of The Sacrifice lived; the houses that, after his death, still bear the memory of his presence.</p>

El grito del sur. Casas Viejas (The shout of the south. Casas viejas)

Basilio Martín Patino

<p>The repression, in 1933, of a libertarian peasant rebellion in the small town of Casas Viejas in C&aacute;diz, &quot;reconstructed&quot; from testimonies, historical analyses, and fragments of supposedly recovered films. A twist on historical memory and its audiovisual representation that has already become a classic.</p>

A la sombra de la Alhambra (In the shade of the Alhambra)

Basilio Martín Patino

<p>Basilio Mart&iacute;n Pati&ntilde;o&#39;s last film. To date, it has only been shown in the context of the Para&iacute;sos exhibition held at the Centro Guerrero in Granada during the winter of 2006-2007. It tells the story of In&eacute;s S&aacute;nchez, daughter of one of the executioners featured in Mart&iacute;n Pati&ntilde;o&#39;s Querid&iacute;simos verdugos (Dearest Executioners) , who discovered her father&#39;s profession after seeing the film on television. &quot;Every time a letter arrived at home, my father would pack his suitcase and leave for a few days.&quot;</p>

Diario (Cap. 1 y 2) (Diary)

David Perlov

<p>Diary 1 (1973-1977). The beginning of it all: a camera, a window, the Perlov family, his wife Mira and their two daughters, Yael and Naomi. Yom Kippur Day 1973: the start of the Yom Kippur War. The streets of S&atilde;o Paulo, the new apartment in Tel Aviv, the Western Wall, the meeting with Isaac Stern and the actor Klaus Kinski. Diary 2 (1978-1980). Yael and Naomi have to enlist in the Israeli army, the director suffers from insomnia, the Pioneers&#39; Cemetery, and a visit to Crete with his wife. Just the two of them. And a song: &quot;Angelitos Negros,&quot; which will be repeated throughout all the diaries.</p>

Estrellas de La Línea (The railroad all stars)

Chema Rodríguez

<p>Valeria, Vilma, and Mercy are Guatemalan prostitutes, charging two dollars a service. They work in La L&iacute;nea, along the train tracks that run through the capital. To draw attention to their plight, they formed a soccer team, trained for weeks, and entered a local tournament. They were expelled because they were prostitutes, sparking controversy throughout the country. This is their story.</p>

La leyenda del tiempo (The legend of time)

Isaki Lacuesta

<p>The Legend of Time is a film told in two voices, Isra&#39;s and Makiko&#39;s. Isra is a Gypsy boy with a prodigious voice who, after his father&#39;s death, decides to mourn and never sing again. Makiko, on the other hand, travels from Japan to Isla because she wants to sing flamenco. Isra can, but doesn&#39;t want to; Makiko wants to, but can&#39;t. Two impossible voices and the distant echo of Camar&oacute;n de la Isla.</p>

Svyato

Victor Kossakovsky

<p>&quot;Svyato&quot; means &quot;happy, clear, joyful.&quot; Svyato is also the diminutive of Svyatoslav, Victor Kossakovsky&#39;s young son, who stars in the documentary. The two-year-old boy looks in a mirror for the first time in his life and sees another boy. Little by little, he becomes aware of who this little blond boy he has just met really is.</p>

Notas de un rebelde kurdo (Notes from a Kurdish Rebel)

Stefano Savona

<p>Why would two young men, perfectly comfortable in Germany, decide to leave everything behind and join the Kurdish guerrillas? In 1980, when Akif was seven years old, the Kurdish people rose up in arms to liberate Turkish Kurdistan. More than 35,000 died, and three million people lost their homes. Akif was able to find refuge in Germany. Now he understands that his time has come.</p>

NOMADAK TX

Raúl de la Fuente Pablo Iraburu Harkaitz Martínez de San Vicente

<p>The txalaparta is an instrument played by two people, and the music that arises from this encounter belongs not to either of them, but to the act of meeting and conversing. Nomadak TX is the story of a desire, that of txalaparta players Igor Otxoa and Harkaitz Mart&iacute;nez. They want the txalaparta to become a meeting place not only between people, but between very different cultures from India, Lapland, Mongolia, and the Sahara.</p>

El regreso del poeta / Poeti veradardze (Return of the Poet)

Harutyun Khachatryan

<p>A lyrical journey through Armenia, following the creation and transport of a statue of Ashugh Jivani, the most important Armenian poet of all time. Khachatryan, a director with a cinematic ability akin to Fellini, writes here, solely with Armenian imagery and song, a love letter to his country&#39;s rich cultural heritage and a critique of its uncertain and divided present.</p>

Arcana

Cristóbal Vicente

<p>Arcana chronicles the last year of operation of the old Valpara&iacute;so prison (Chile), which closed in April 1999. It is a tribute to the place and to the values ​​and customs of the men who inhabited it secretly for one hundred and fifty years, beyond the knowledge of the outside world.</p>

Al este del paraíso (East of Paradise)

Lech Kowalsky

<p>At the start of World War II, Maria Werla, director Lech Kowalsky&#39;s mother, was forced to flee Poland and sent to a labor camp in Siberia. Lech Kowalsky grew up in the US and actively experienced the emergence of punk culture in the 1960s and 70s. Now that all that is behind them, Maria and Lech try to decipher whether their very different lives have anything in common. And they discover sadness.</p>

37 usos para una oveja muerta (37 Uses for a Dead Sheep)

Ben Hopkins

<p>The 2,000 members of the Palmyra tribe of Kyrgyz have migrated from the USSR to China, from Afghanistan to Turkey, fleeing the history of the 20th century. Their sheep have always been their companions. No one knows their secrets better than they do. Blending comic book style with ethnographic filmmaking, and employing humor and a vitalistic perspective, Hopkins directs one of the biggest British film hits of the year.</p>

Un día en la vida de Andrei Arsenevich / Une journée d'Andrei Arsenevitch (One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch)

Chris Marker

<p>Andrei Tarkovsky, lying in his hospital bed, awaits the arrival of his son Andryusha from Moscow, after the Soviet authorities, upon learning of the director&#39;s irreversible health condition, agreed to grant him an exit visa. Five years have passed since their last meeting, and Andryusha is no longer the child he left behind in the USSR. Without getting out of bed, Andrei and Andryusha embrace. Is such sacrifice for cinema worthwhile?</p>

Tarkovski y yo (Tarkovski and Me)

Eldar Grigorian

<p>For years, ever since her arrival in Germany from Russia, the director&#39;s grandmother has repeated a ritual: she sits in a chair by the window of her apartment in Bensheim and gazes out at the usually deserted street. In this old woman&#39;s life, everything else belongs to the past, including Tarkovsky, whose memory appears here as a symbol of Russian nostalgia.</p>

Poesía y Verdad (Poetry and Truth)

Edgardo Cozarinsky

<p>Poetry and Truth is a beautiful essay on the mystical dimension of Tarkovsky, which has only been screened previously at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, on the occasion of the 2002 retrospective. The director himself has rescued his work from his personal archive and made a new copy for Dear Andrei.</p>

Parajanov. La última primavera (Parajanov: The Last Spring)

Mikhail Vartanov

<p>Tarkovsky and Parajanov are the two greatest filmmakers of the second half of the 20th century in the USSR. Last Spring brings us closer to Parajanov (filmmaker, painter, ceramist, writer) through the raw footage of the last film he had in his hands before his death in 1990. It also contains one of the most beautiful tributes to Tarkovsky, born from his friendship with Parajanov. The film won the NIKA Award (the Russian equivalent of the Oscar) for Best Documentary.</p>

Los sueños de Stalker

Evgenii Tsymbal

<p>The face of actor Alexander Kaidanovsky remains inextricably linked to the character of Stalker, which gives its title to the film directed by Tarkovsky in 1979. Tsymbal, assistant director on Stalker, tries to reconstruct the personality, dreams and nightmares of Kaidanovsky (who died in 1995), a man marked by the character and condemned to wander as Stalker through the most sinister and disturbing paths of Soviet cinema.</p>

Elegía de la vida / Elegiya dorogi (Estreno de Elegy of Life)

Alexander Sokurov

<p>A diptych portrait of the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnewskaya. Elegy of Life is a nostalgic look at the final years of Russian history, guided by Rostropovich&#39;s infectious joy, his wife&#39;s poignant serenity, and the melancholy of Sokurov, who films the end of these lives with the serenity of one who knows that death is merely the path to the light.</p>

El labio partido / El Labio Herido (The Split Lip)

Aurélien Vernhes-Lermusiaux

<p>This short film premiered in Paris in December 2006 as part of the commemorations for the twentieth anniversary of Tarkovsky&#39;s death. It explores the director&#39;s obsession with the face of a young girl he had glimpsed in one of Tarkovsky&#39;s films. Many years later, Aur&eacute;lien Vernhes-Lerrmusiaux encountered that face in Paris, discovered it was Tarkovsky&#39;s own daughter (Olga Carri), and decided to film it again. But was it possible?</p>

Balnearios

Mariano Llinás

<p>Lifeguards, luxury hotels from early XXth Century, mermaids, sea animals and sand castles gather in this labyrinthine essay. A &quot;documentary&quot; about balnearios, Argentine bath resorts and the idea of cities dedicated exclusively to idleness, empty along the winter months and crowded in the summer.</p> <p>The first film by Llin&aacute;s is an affectionate and slightly irreverent meditation on an Argentine cultural icon little known to the outside world: the turn-of-the century sea resorts that linger on in the popular imagination as an ideal of leisure, recreation and national prosperity. As an essay film, Balnearios unfolds through a series of twisting and leaping synoptic moves that anticipate the complex fragmentary structures and strategies explored in his later epic films. An odd and humorous encyclopedia regarding costumes and stories from Argentine bath resorts. Cities under water, lifeguards, luxury hotels from early XXth Century, mermaids, dams, small town public resorts, sea animals and sand castles gather in a surprising and labyrinthical essay. The idea of cities dedicated exclusively to idleness, watering and rest, completely empty along the winter months and crowded in the summer; the idea of modern pagan cities given to the worship of the sea, may be thought as a strange, fascinating phenomenon. This film is the result of such fascination. &ndash; Mariano Llin&aacute;s</p>

Eye/Machine I

Harun Farocki

<p>The film centers on the images of the Gulf War, which caused worldwide outrage in 1991. In the shots taken from projectiles homing in on their targets, bomb and reporter were identical, according to a theory put forward by the philosopher Klaus Theweleit. At the same time it was impossible to distinguish between the photographed and the (computer) simulated images. The loss of the &#39;genuine picture&#39; means the eye no longer has a role as historical witness. It has been said that what was brought into play in the Gulf War was not new weaponry, but rather a new policy on images. In this way the basis for electronic warfare was created. Today, kilo tonnage and penetration are less important than the so-called C3I cycle, which has come to encircle our world. C3I refers to Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence--and means global and tactical early warning systems, area surveillance through seismic, acoustic and radar sensors, radio direction sounding, monitoring opponents&#39; communications, as well as the use of jamming to suppress all these techniques. Harun Farocki explores the question of how military image technologies find their way into civilian life.</p>

Eye/Machine II

Harun Farocki

<p>How can the distinction between man&quot; and &quot;machine&quot; still be made given today&#39;s technology? In modern weapons technology the categories are on the move: intelligence is no longer limited to humans. In Eye/Machine II, Farocki has brought together visual material from both military and civilian sectors, showing machines operating intelligently and what it is they see when working on the basis of image processing programs. The traditional man-machine distinction becomes reduced to &quot;eye/machine&quot;, where cameras are implanted into the machines as eyes.</p>

Eye/Machine III

Harun Farocki

<p>&ldquo;The third part of the Eye/Machine cycle structures the material around the concept of the operational image. These are images which do not portray a process, but are themselves part of a process. As early as the Eighties, cruise missiles used a stored image of a real landscape, then took an actual image during flight; the software compared the two images, resulting in a comparison between idea and reality, a confrontation between pure war and the impurity of the actual. This confrontation is also a montage, and montage is always about similarity and difference. Many operational images show colored guidance lines, intended to portray the process of recognition. The lines tell us emphatically what is all-important in these images, and just as emphatically what is of no importance at all. Superfluous reality is denied--a constant denial provoking opposition.&rdquo;</p>

Arseni Tarkovski: presencia eterna (Arseni Tarkovski: Eternal Presence)

Viatcheslav Amirkhanian

<p>The great poet Arseny Tarkovsky, born in 1910, outlived his son, the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, by four years. In those final years, his only solace was his encounter with a young filmmaker, Vyacheslav Amirkhanian, to whom he entrusted the last images and the last silences of his life. &quot;You&#39;ll know what to do with this,&quot; he told him. Amirkhanian made this film, which won first prize at the prestigious Mar del Plata Film Festival (Argentina) in 2005.</p>

Andréi Tarkovski: El Recuerdo

Andréi Tarkovski Alexey Naydynov

<p>In the final shot of his last film, The Sacrifice , Andrei Tarkovsky dedicated the film to his son Andryusha, whom he had not seen for five years due to the Soviet authorities&#39; prohibition against the young man reuniting with his father in exile. After Andrei&#39;s death, the young Andryusha reciprocates that dedication with this &quot;letter&quot; to his father, giving voice to colleagues and friends who admired his work.</p>

Los rubios (The blonds)

Albertina Carri

<p>The horrific story of those who disappeared during the dictatorship in Argentina has been told in countless ways, but with each film, the impossibility of the endeavor becomes even more apparent. Is the testimony of the living enough to give us an idea of ​​the fate of the missing? For Albertina Carri, words alone are insufficient (she lost her parents when she was just four years old), so she uses an actress to portray her in the documentary.</p>

Siguiendo a Sean (Following Sean)

Ralph Arlyck

<p>Arlyck&#39;s first film was a portrait of his neighbor Sean, a four-year-old boy living with a hippie family in San Francisco. A quarter of a century later, the director wonders what became of that boy and the ideals of that revolution. Arlyck searches for Sean and decides to follow him for ten years, from 1994 to 2003.</p>

País de la energía (Energy Country)

Deborah Stratman

<p>A journey through the industrial landscape of Texas, not only as a pictorial reference, but as a specific denunciation of the pernicious workings of the oil market. The almost dreamlike tour of the oil refineries in the southern part of the state contrasts with and intertwines with the harsh words of religious fundamentalism that reach us through sound.</p>

Noviembre (November)

Hito Steyerl

<p>November is an elegy to a friend, Andrea Wolf, with whom Steyerl made a martial arts film when she was 17. Andrea then joined the Kurdish militia and was killed in 1998 as a suspected terrorist. What had happened during that time? Steyerl says this is a project about the November era, &quot;when the revolution is over and only its gestures remain.&quot;</p>

Muerte en Vignole (Mort à Vignole)

Olivier Smolders

<p>Using an old amateur film shot in Venice, the director reflects on those familiar portraits of happiness that are home movies, on the passage of time, affective memory, death and mourning.</p>

Momentos escogidos de Histoire(s) du cinéma (Chosen Moments of Historie(s) of Cinema)

Jean-Luc Godard

<p>Ten years ago, Godard created a monumental four-and-a-half-hour work on the history of images, their place in that history, and the very death or exhaustion of cinema, titled Histoire(s) du Cin&eacute;ma . What we present here is a redux version of that celebrated work, with fragments selected by Godard himself. An essential film.</p>

Los Ángeles protagonista

Thom Anderson

<p>Los Angeles is undoubtedly the city that has served as the backdrop for countless films. We&#39;ve all driven its avenues and cherished its hidden corners. Using fragments from numerous films treated as historical documents, such as Mulholland Drive , Terminator, Ed Wood, Chinatown, and others, Anderson constructs an &quot;urban symphony&quot; of this city-set.</p>

Lecciones de historia (History Lessons)

Barbara Hammer

<p>Matriarch and founder of militant feminist cinema, Barbara Hammer revisits the denied history of lesbianism in 20th-century culture in this film, through nudies , sex education films, fragments of Leni Riefenstahl&#39;s work, melodramas, advertisements, and Hollywood films. A masterclass in editing that reveals hidden or concealed aspects of popular culture.</p>

Hojas brillantes (Bright Leaves)

Ross McElwee

<p>The story of the director&#39;s great-grandfather, a tobacco entrepreneur who founded the Bull Burnham brand, served as the basis for an old Hollywood melodrama directed by Michael Curtiz. Three generations later, McElwee embarks on a journey through South Carolina accompanied by all the ghosts of Curtiz and his grandfather, knowing that the initial pretext for this trip could transform at any moment and change not only the film, but his very understanding of life.</p>

El capricho (The Fancy)

Elisabeth Subrin

<p>An enigma: the life of photographer Francesca Woodman, born in 1958 and who committed suicide in 1981. With the scant evidence of her photographic material, her controversial photos and the spaces she inhabited, the filmmaker attempts to unravel the mystery of an existence, forming a biographical speculation that does not intend to explain but to question the life of another.</p>

Drama pasajero (Passing Drama)

Angela Melitopoulos

<p>Angela, the director, had grandparents who survived the deportations from Asia Minor to Greece in 1923. Their children, in turn, were slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Angela Melitopoulos, granddaughter and daughter of refugees, delves into the logic of memory for those who have nowhere to return to, no homeland, no home.</p>

Comer, dormir, nada de mujeres (Eat, Sleep, No Women)

Heiner Stadler

<p>On October 7, 2001, at 5:27 p.m., the entire world was focused on what was happening in one place: Afghanistan. The US bombing campaign against that country began, ultimately ending the Taliban regime. But what was happening simultaneously in the rest of the world? Somewhat related to I&ntilde;&aacute;rritu&#39;s Babel , the film reflects on the globalization of information and the connection between the small stories of everyday life, wherever they may occur.</p>