Punto de Vista 2023 Festival Catalog

Punto de Vista - International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra is promoted by Department of Culture and Sport, Government of Navarra, and organized by NICDO S.L. Plaza de la Constitución, s/n. 31002 Pamplona (Navarra)

Tel. 948 06 60 66

info@puntodevistafestival.com www.puntodevistafestival.com

Catalogue for the International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra, No 17

Published by NICDO S.L.

Printed by Imprenta Zubillaga

ISSN - 2171/2166 Addendum 17

Legal deposit

NA 266-2010

Promoted by

Organized by

With the aid of

With the support of

Member of Contributors

Management Committee

Ignacio Apezteguia Morentin, Lorenzo García Echegoyen, Ana Herrera Isasi (Department of Culture, Government of Navarra), Paula Noya (NICDO), Pablo Berástegui and Itziar García

Team

Artistic Director

Manuel Asín

Executive Director

Teresa Morales de Álava

Programming Committee

Manuel Asín

Pablo García Canga

Lur Olaizola

Lucía Salas

Miguel Zozaya

Production Coordinator

María Rodríguez Abad

Production Department

Garazi Erburu Irigoyen

Mikel González Parra

Programming Coordinator

Cristian Ruiz Carrera

Communication Coordinator

Pablo Sotés Mariñelarena

Communication Department

Andrés Bueno Chocarro

Acknowledgements

Editorial Coordinator

Esther Aizpuru

Guest and Accreditations Coordinator

Sara Larripa Acedo

Guest and Accreditations Department

Josefina Maggiotto Iribarne

Vanessa Chacín

Technical Manager

Iker Espúñez

Technical Department

Pablo Cayuelo

Catalina Altuna

Film Department - NICDO Silvia García Domínguez

Image, photography

Rodrigo Pérez Rodríguez - Txisti

Recording, editing video

Miguel Eraso

Image of Punto de Vista 2023

Misha Bies Golas

Design, catalogue and other materials

Franziska

Translation

Hitzurun

Text translation

Kosuke Nakamori (Japanese)

Mattea Cussel (English)

Technical projection services

Técnica Cinematográfica Loza Subtitula’m

Movilcine S.L

Sound

Telesonic S.L.

Film subtitles

Subtitula’m

Interpreters

STI World S.L.

NICDO Team, Adrián García Prado, Alfonso Crespo, Antonio Trullén, Arrate Velasco, Asier Armental, Carlos Muguiro, Cecilia Barrionuevo, Cyril Neyrat, David Arratibel, Efrén Cuevas, Elisa Celda, Fabienne Aguado, Fabienne Moris, Fran Gayo, Frank Beauvais, Garbiñe Ortega, Hama Haruka, Hatano Yukie, Isabella Lenzi, Jaime Pena, Javier Rebollo, Jean-Pierre Rehm, Josetxo Cerdán, Juan Pablo Huércanos, Juan Zapater, Juliette Achard, Madoka Kubota, Manuel Peláez, Mariano Mayer, Marina Vinyes, Matthieu Grimault, Mikel Artxanko, Óscar Fernández Orengo, Óscar Gascón, Óscar Vincentelli, Oskar Alegria, Pablo La Parra, Pablo Useros, Rafael Llano, Sergio Oksman, Tsveta Dobreva, Vanesa Fernández Guerra, Vanesa García Cazorla and Víctor Iriarte

Meeting place

Our community is kicking off a new edition of Punto de Vista, the International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra. A meeting place because it is intended to be a place for different people to come together with the aim of excelling and innovating. And a chance for the public to come along and discover audiovisual experiences to enrich us, off the traditional screening circuits. A landmark at international level, a place for documentary film from all over the world to come together.

This time, one of the central programmes will be the retrospective Other Times Are Coming. Es nahen andere Zeiten, the first national event of its kind on the work of German film-maker Peter Nestler, complemented with films made by his wife, Zsóka. This is one of the most important bodies of documentary work in contemporary Europe, though it is still little known in Spain, for which reason this innovative series will be visiting Barcelona, Madrid, Coruña and Valencia.

Nestler’s work has been widely shown internationally, so Punto de Vista is offering a new, significant selection of his film work, based on archive finds and restorations in recent years, as well as on some recent productions.

The festival considers it necessary to pay homage to the career of an essential director who remains active despite his age, filming and taking part in public events. We are privileged to be able to bring the work of a major figure on the European documentary film scene to Navarra, where his presence will also allow his experience to be passed on to younger generations.

The Official Selection, Focus, Lan and X Films will be other areas for audiences and film-makers to come together in the field of documentaries and non-fiction in general. Spaces for dialogue between past and future, where the most diverse traditions can come together with the boldest, most innovative offerings; spaces for excellence. Punto de Vista sets out to be a festival that fosters knowledge of reality and independent expression, stimulating an approach to films as an independent, socially necessary means of expression.

The festival also works actively to foster critical audiences, aware of audiovisual languages and of the diverse realities around the world. The Mediation Program is a commitment to younger people, introducing them to the world of documentary through attractive activities that speak their own language, in a relaxed, friendly way. With workshops and screenings, the second edition of Jóvenes Programadores Moving Cinema x Punto de Vista and the Youth Jury represents a clear commitment to make documentary film accessible, for it to be enjoyed by the whole of Navarrese society.

In presenting this year’s edition, we need to thank the many people and bodies linked to the festival year after year. First of all, the team and especially Manuel Asín, as artistic director for the second year, for making his mark on a proven, experienced Punto de Vista. To the companies and institutions who work with us, because they provide the support we need to put on a great festival with a wide impact. And of course, the audience: our most loyal audience, those attracted to come to this wonderful event for the first time and those who have yet to come. Enjoy it!

Bermejo

Rebeca Esnaola

Minister of Culture and Sport in the Government of Navarra

To lift the gaze

The day-to-day activity of the Festival allows us to enter into contact with what is being produced in the feverish field of what we still call “documentary filmmaking”. We have discussed a large number of films over several months and ended up choosing a few that invariably resonate with the other series and activities in the programme. We opened up the angle as much as possible to then cut back -always extendable, always improvableof what we on the programming committee consider urgent and necessary. This cutting back means —above all— a celebration of the complex integration that some films manage to achieve. A commitment to reality, understood from as wide-ranging a perspective as possible, and also to the art that makes up the films.

There is no contradiction between both forms of commitment. Nevertheless, misunderstandings may arise if we underestimate the integrated nature of both dimensions. Filmmaking has its own dynamics, which never stop being firmly interconnected with those of the world. The ways in which filmmaking transforms reality, and is configured by it at the same time, do not need to seem different to us if we are able to see them from the right perspective, from the way in which the sociability of a group of foxes, a dialogue or a human conflict, the voice of an old dike sluice, a meteor shower or a lava flow are configured by reality and can transform it.

In 1923, Jean Epstein filmed some of these lava streams in a serious but amazed way during one of the last eruptions of Mount Etna. That film, La Montagne infidèle —lost until a copy was recently found in Filmoteca de Catalunya— will be screened in the Closing Ceremony of the Festival. Following his experience under the volcano, Epstein carried out some soul-searching that will hopefully have an effect on those who attend all the sessions we are proposing this year. “The cinema brings all the kingdoms of Nature into one, the one with the greatest amount of life [...]. Before me, a movie theatre with three hundred people groaned in unison when seeing a grain of wheat sprouting on the screen. [...] To grow and unite, stones have pleasant and ordinary gestures, like rediscovering cherished memories [...]. There is no still life on screen”.

The two retrospectives this year also respond to this desire for integration. The first wide-ranging series of the films of Peter Nestler in Spain aspires to be a tribute to the work of one of the filmmakers we admire the most. A work produced with humbleness and perseverance over six decades, ever more respected for the coherence with which it defends the memory, transformation and preservation of what should be remembered, transformed and preserved. Programmed by Ricardo Matos Cabo —responsible for previous international presentations of the work of the filmmaker—, together with our colleague Lucía Salas, the retrospective is complemented by a publication that wants to be an introduction and a celebration of the constant features of Nestler’s filmmaking: the camera and the microphone as tools to open up to the world with honesty and justice; a conception of cinematographic work that transcends the traps of individualism; the continued exercise of what Bertolt Brecht called “the art of the realists”, that is, “unearthing the truth under the rubble of evidence, visibly linking the singular to the general, fixing the particular in the great process”.

The second retrospective this year, once again brilliantly programmed by Miriam Martín, looks into some of the natural process of which we are part (the stubbornly harmful part, we should add). In the last edition, human action on rivers inspired an extraordinary small history of the documentary in Miriam, and now it is a case of making us see the painful drift of the human race that has become a producer as well as a consumer, and the way in which acquiring essential goods is creating a threat to all living species, ours included. It is about starting from some of these products, with their human names —“fish”, “bread”, “meat”— in order to go back upstream in the construction and destruction that leads to them, through a journey back to the seed. Miriam’s dazzling texts speak of centripetal and centrifugal forces that mould the world and films. Indeed, each piece in her programmes —and the interplay among them— are put together with great care so that we can see and reflect on processes that we should urgently stop considering as closed. They are impregnated with change and can, in turn, be changed.

Let us return to Etna. In the summers of 1986 and 1988, more than sixty years after the shooting of Epstein’s film, Danièle Huillet and the recently deceased Jean-Marie Straub —dear colleagues and friends of Peter Nestler— climbed the slopes of the volcano again to shoot scenes of Der Tod des Empedokles, the tragedy that Friedrich Hölderlin had set in that same location in 1779, i.e. on the eve of a revolution that would later be called ‘industrial’. Hölderlin, who incarnated a different kind of utopia better than anyone for Straub, in which “the greenness of the earth will once again shine for you”, would surely have been moved to see his work staged in the open air, next to the volcano. On the edge of the real crater Danièle and Jean-Marie, Hölderlin, Ana Useros and Miriam Martín —in the translation below— make Empedocles utter words that are the best preface to the six days of screenings and dialogues that we are about to share:

You have thirsted after the unusual for a long time, and, like a sick body, the spirit of Agrigento desires to leave the old furrow. So, take a chance! What you have inherited, what you have acquired, what your parents’ mouths have told and taught you. laws and customs, names of ancient gods, boldly forget them and lift, like new-born babies, your eyes to divine Nature.

Manuel Asín Artistic Director, Punto de Vista

The photographs that make up the image of this, the seventeenth edition of Punto de Vista, are part of a set of around a hundred shots taken, like a catalogue, of offcuts collected among the waste from a leather goods workshop.

Using the parchments left over from making the menus for a traditional Castilian tavern, apart from the straight lines cut by the leather worker, the artist also makes more sinuous, curved cuts, to which he also adds a series of stress points using the holes already made by the tanners when stretching the hides in their workshop.

Viewed one by one over a light box, these fragments were photographed with the aim of emulating the mechanics of some types of shadow theatre from south-east Asia and Turkey. The tonal variations in them are the result of free interpretation by the camera of the movements of the fluorescent lights.

Nor is it naive —perhaps in the way it treats its materials, in its shapes, atmospheres and the decision to capture them in photographs— it is a nod to certain authors like Julio González, Ángel Ferrant, Eugenio Granell or the artists of the Vallecas school.

Consequently, many of the shapes resulting from this multi-person process were used to create a series of movable sculptures and installations whose aim is to generate different ways of playing with space by projecting their shadows.

Based upon several experimental works completed in his studio and at Monasterio de la Inmaculada Concepción de Loeches, the artist Misha Bies Golas has designed a work specifically for one of the spaces at the Museo Oteiza. An exhibit in which parchments combine with light, sound and other construction materials to form a dialogue between the architecture and the the permanent elements of the space within the home studio of Oteiza.

The Punto de Vista 2023 image designed by Misha Bies Golas can be appreciated throughout the entire catalogue.

Misha Bies Golas is a visual artist trained in the fields of photography and graphic design. His work cuts across different disciplines, his most recent pieces concentrating on the accumulations of scrap materials, books and objects of different kinds. He currently forms part of the NEG (Nova Escultura Galega) group, together with Alejandra Pombo Su, Diego Vites and Jorge Varela. He has had solo exhibitions in Galicia (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Fundación Luis Seoane), Madrid (SALÓN, Nadie Nunca Nada No), Palma de Mallorca (Louis 21), Valencia (Luis Adelantado), Lisbon (Appleton Square) and São Paulo (Ateliê Fidalga), as well as featuring in many collective exhibitions.

Official Selection

This year’s Official Selection includes seven short films and eleven international feature films competing for the festival’s five awards: the Punto de Vista Grand Prize for Best Film, the Jean Vigo Award for Best Director, the Best Short Film Award, the Audience Special Award and the Youth Award. Six world premieres, two international premieres, one European premiere and eight Spanish premieres.

Official Selection Jury

Ángel Santos Touza. Galician film-maker who has been working since 2002. He holds a degree in the History of Art and a diploma in Film Direction from the Centre d’Estudis Cinematogràfics de Catalunya. He has written about film (Miradas de Cine, Blogs & Docs, Shangri-la) and co-founded Novos Cinemas, Pontevedra International Film Festival, of which he was artistic director for the first five years (2015-2019). As a teacher he has been involved in the classroom education scheme Cinema en Curs. He has given seminars for universities, arts centres and festivals; he has been a consultant in project development forums (Malaga festival, MECAS in Las Palmas and FIDBA in Buenos Aires), and has been a jury member at international festivals including FICX in Gijón, Spain, and FICUNAM in Mexico.

Hama Haruka. She has worked for the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF) since 2001, and has been director of its Tokyo office since 2015. She coordinated Nexus of Borders: Ryukyu Reflections (YIDFF 2003), Vista de Cuba (YIDFF 2011) and the Latinoamérica programmes (YIDFF 2015). She also works for Cinematrix, a Tokyo-based film distributor, which made Takamine Go’s feature-length film Hengyoro (Queer Fish Lane), produced by Hama. She is involved in coordinating national and international screenings, including curating the film programme at the 2016 Aichi Trienniale.

Marcos Uzal. Since 2020 he has edited the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Before this he had sat on the editorial committees of Trafic and Vertigo magazines, and written as a critic for the newspaper Libération. He has also programmed film screenings at the Musée d’Orsay, and lectured at numerous film institutions. He has also edited the Côtés films collection, published by Yellow Now. He has written several books for the same publisher: Vaudou de Jacques Tourneur (2006), Guy Gilles. Un cinéaste au fil de temps (2014) and Jerzy Skolimowski. Signes particuliers (2013). He is the author of the short films Le Taxidermiste (1993), La Ville des chiens (1994) and Ici-Bas (1998). Since 2010 he has sat on the jury for the Prix Jean Vigo, and since 2022 for the Prix André Bazin.

Al borde del agua

Maria Elorza & Iñigo Salaberria

Spain, 2023, 20 min, super-8 to DCP, colour, Spanish World Premiere

Selected filmography

Maria Elorza: A los libros y a las mujeres canto (2022), Quebrantos (2020, with Koldo Almandoz), Ancora lucciole (2018), Gure hormek (2016, with Las chicas de Pasaik) Iñigo Salaberria: Lo ibiltariak (2017), Luz a la deriva (2015), Disdirak (1992), Birta Mirkur (1987)

Al borde del agua [Beside the Water] is the work of two people: Iñigo Salaberria and Maria Elorza. A film-maker born in 1988 in Donostia-San Sebastián, she was a member of Las chicas de Pasaik, and in 2022 presented her first feature: A los libros y a las mujeres canto. He, born in Rentería in 1962 and recently deceased, was a key figure in the Arteleku centre and one of the most important video artists of the 80s and 90s. The film begins with a phrase: “Between 1984 and 1988, Iñigo Salaberria filmed several locations with a small Super 8 camera. It was test material. The reels were never edited and remained in the shadows for thirty-three years”. After this, the images filmed by Salaberria appear. Reflections in the water that turn figures into shapes, colours and textures; whaling ships; a lake where smoke and steam mix; buildings that turn into vertical lines; more reflections in water, accompanied by the sound of the water itself, and sometimes by classical music. Above all they are drafts for Salaberria’s pieces Quai de Javel (1984) and Birta Myrkur (1987). Attractive images framed in such a way as to turn them almost into paintings, that bring us closer to the video artist’s view. To what his relationship with reality through the camera was actually like. We can also hear his voice, which in several conversations with Elorza tells us more about his reflection on what is involved in filming images: “Wandering, walking, looking. Unhurriedly, with time. Walking, looking, wasting time. I’ve never filmed in a hurry. That slowness, I don’t know why, appealed to me. Well, I do know why. Because what I wanted to document is what’s inside”.

Lur Olaizola

APOCALIPSIS 20 21 22

Julius Richard

Spain, 2022, 65 min, miniDV to DCP, colour, silent

World Premiere

Script and editing

Julius Richard

Tamayo / Selected filmography ABCLSD (2020), Trabajo y amor. Diarios I-XII (20202008), Aluzinaciones (2018-2013), Me gusta bailar pero no en el aire (2016-2009), colectivo el hijo (2016-2011), Tríptico (o Pentáptico) del Amor Supremo (2013-2012)

This film is a year of life and lasts just over an hour. The film-maker, by creating layers of images and layers of sound, condenses time and experience. He makes a film that is like his own tattooed body: superimposed texts and images, past decisions that remain indelible on the present, changing body. We could say the director, in filming and editing, crystallises a year. Or perhaps creates an alter out of what is filmed. On this altar there are candles and a thousand other flames: the sun, the lava of a volcano, a crematorium, bonfires and more. Moreover, it is all seen as if, in some way, it were fire: moving, changing, hypnotic, born out of what it consumes. The film-maker creates an altar and on it intones a prayer or an incantation for the family, for loved ones. Yes, perhaps it’s this, an incantation to escape from a terrible year, from an ongoing apocalypse. Or perhaps not. It’s difficult, and probably unnecessary, to fit a film that escapes and reinvents itself as it goes along into a box or a feeling. A film that in reality is made to be seen but also to be listened to an, even more, to be seen while listening to the music, for the image to be sound and the sound image, and so that in the end both sound and image become touch.

Pablo García Canga

Bide bazterrean hi eta ni kantari

Peru Galbete

Spain, 2023, 9 min, HD-VHSsuper-8 to DCP, colour, Basque World Premiere

Script and editing

Peru Galbete / Selected filmography

Ura sartu zen barrura (2019), Josuneren bidaia (2015)

This is a film in which we hear and read poems by Joxean Artze. This film is also a poem itself. A short poem made up of poems, of sounds, of images of the past and images of the present. A poem made from the magic of film called editing, that makes it possible to put together things that in reality can’t go together. A film that puts together, in a flash, two times on the same terrace, a film that superimposes the sound of the sea and the image of a metro tunnel. A film that puts together two birds that have lived far apart for decades, two birds that are unique but at the same time are the same bird. Perhaps this is the magic of editing: the magic of “at the same time”. As in dreams, there where time and space become confused. This film could be a dream dreamed by those children we see in pictures sleeping and suddenly become adults but still sleeping. One of those dreams that on waking you don’t know whether you really remember it or whether you’re reinventing it when you try to explain it. One of those dreams that are totally meaningful but at the same time slippery. Once of those dreams whose memory you want to cling to even though that memory is uncertain and changing, because you know it’s telling you something, something important.

Pablo

García Canga

Boulevards de la Senne

Juliette Achard & Ian Menoyot

Belgium, 2023, 11 min, DV PAL to DCP, colour, French World Premiere

Cinematography Ryszard Karcz / Production Juliette Achard and Ian Menoyot / Selected filmography Remparts (2023), Karl Marx à Bruxelles (2022), Le souci de nous (2022), Main pour main (2019), Autant en emporte ly vens (2018), Aux envolés (2017), Saule Marceau (Juliette Achard, 2017)

Boulevards de la Senne starts by naming in writing the elements that make up the film. In white letters on a black background: “The voices of Saidou Ly, Joan-Noël Boissé, Juliette Achard, Ian Menoyot and Ryszard Karcz. Also, a poem by Saidou Ly that is part of Des intégrations, the book La Senne by Gustave Abeels (1983), the book La Belgique by Camille Lemonnier (1888), photographs from the Brussels Archive (1860-1866) and a song: Trois Chant Sacrés pour soprano et trio à cordes (1951)”. By combining all these things, the film-makers create an essay film that talks about Brussels and the development work that made a permanent mark on the city’s experience: covering over the river Senne in the mid-19th century. The film-makers use different devices to bring the Senne back, in a way, to flow through the Belgian capital once more. The film begins with a map, that gives way to images shot in the streets today. Views of different places, the past of which is explained by different voiceovers that recount the history of the place: the pollution of the river, the dirty water, the work to cover it over and the compulsory purchases involved in this. In the final part of the film, the past moves from the voiceover to the pictures: various archive photographs show us what Brussels was like before the Senne was covered over. A city where the streets were flooded with water. Lur Olaizola

Cette maison

Miryam Charles

Canada, 2022, 75 min, 16 mm to DCP, colour, French-English

Cinematography

Isabelle Stachtchenko and Miryam Charles / Sound Gordon Neil Allen and Olivier Calvert / Editing Xi Feng / Music

Romain Camiolo / Production Embuscade

Films-Félix DufourLaperrière / Selected filmography

Chanson pour le nouveau monde (2021), Deuxième génération (2019), Une forteresse (2018), Trois Atlas (2018), Vers les colonies (2016), Vole, vole tristesse (2015) / Berlinale Forum, IndieLisboa, Hot Docs

In 2008 Tessa, aged 14, was found hanged in her bedroom. The autopsy showed that the girl had been raped and murdered before being hanged. Ten years later, her cousin Miryam Charles made Cette maison [This House], her first feature. The film begins with a clear proposition: the actress Schelby Jean-Baptiste, playing Tessa, invites us on a journey through time to three places: Haiti, the United States and Canada. Facing the camera, the actress explains that the film is about her, Tessa in an adult body that never existed, and her mother. Once the invitation is clear, the journey begins. It starts with Tessa and her mother looking at a picture in which we see a view of Haiti, their country of origin. It is a highly theatrical staging, explicitly constructing the setting. Surrounded by darkness, the two actresses are sitting on a rug looking at the pretty landscape in the picture. The image is completed by the sound of the sea, which is very much present. The theatricality of the scene and the clear presence of the different elements of which it is made up show the construction of the fiction. As if the director wanted to make the fabrication of the film visible. And not only that, but Charles, in a beautiful 16 mm, managed to make film shine with all its power as she sets out to “write a story, another story. An impossible story”. Because film can do just this, tell impossible stories. Film makes it possible for Tessa herself to tell us her own story, her own birth and her own death.

Lur Olaizola

Canadian International Documentary Festival, Olhar de Cinema (Curitiba IFF), Trinidad + Tobago Film Festival, Montréal Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Viennale, Novos Cinema Film Festival

Chaylla Clara Teper & Paul Pirritano

France, 2022, 72 min, DCP, colour, French Spanish Premiere

Cinematography Paul Pirritano / Sound Clara Teper / Editing Pascale

Hannoyer and Manuel Vidal / Script Clara Teper, Paul Pirritano / Production Marc Fayer (Novanima Productions) / Selected filmography Demain l’usine (Clara Teper, 2016) / Visions du réel, États généraux du film documentaire de Lussas, Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal, Traces de Vie

Chaylla smokes before going into a centre for prevention of domestic violence. This is to be followed by many other cigarettes: at her front door, on her way out of the doctor’s, outside a party. Cigarettes that punctuate the film like introspective parentheses, moments to stop and think and rethink what has already happened, what continues to happen, the next legal step to take. Pauses in which to gather the strength to carry on fighting to get out of a violent, abusive conjugal relationship that she has tried fruitlessly to save too many times. She is not alone: apart from the crucial relationship with her lawyer, Chaylla has the unconditional support of two invaluable allies, her best friend and her own mother in law, with whom she shares smiles, tears and songs.

The camera follows this young 23 year-old mother form northern France very closely, sometimes almost touching her face, allowing us to see much more than what the words say, and it does so for a considerable length of time (which we often notice first from the changes in her hair). We accompany Chaylla on a long path, a process of internal reconstruction and external recognition that, apart from the distinctive traits of each woman, each private relationship or each legal system, is shown to be largely universal.

Miguel Zozaya

De songes au songe d’un autre miroir

Yunyi Zhu

France, 2022, 16 min, DCP, colour, French Spanish Premiere

Cinematography

Raphaël Rueb and Yunyi Zhu / Sound

Raphaël Zucconi

and Déborah Drelon / Editing Yuyan Wang / Selected filmography

Tout ce qui était proche

s’éloigne (2021) / Berlinale Generation

How does one imagine without images? What are the dreams of people who cannot see like? How can they dream geometry or colours? How can they conceive in their mind of a concept like our reflection in a mirror, so abstract, so cold, so slippery?

“My hands are my mirror; it’s my fingers that give me my reflection”, says a little girl. Lewis Carroll’s Alice wondered, “And what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?”. What must it be like to read that in Braille? We don’t know, because we can’t cross to the other side of the mirror. We can’t imagine her Wonderland without pictures, because we have a different concept of “wonders”: “My Wonderland is full of soft textures and there are lots of nice sounds, like the birds I can hear singing, and even the texture of cool grass beneath my head. This is my Wonderland; it’s not much, but it’s all I need”.

At a sensory education centre in Lille, northern France, artist Yunyi Zhu takes his camera to some blind girls to try to understand, through the art of images, what a world without images is like, Precisely because it’s an impotent tool, film might be the ideal tool to introduce is to an imperceptible perception, unreachable for those of us who can see, because it places us at a disadvantage, in the place of otherness: as one of the girls says, her story goes beyond our narrative.

Miguel Zozaya

Éclaireuses

Lydie Wisshaupt-Claudel

Belgium, 2022, 90 min, DCP, colour, French Spanish Premiere

Cinematography Colin Lévêque / Sound

Thomas GrimmLandsberg and Lucas Lebart / Editing Méline Van Aelbrouck / Production Les Productions du Verger / Selected filmography

Killing Time - Entre deux fronts (2015), Sideroads (2012), Il y a encore de la lumière (2006) / Visions du Réel, Festival Jean Rouch, Millenium, Etats-Généraux du Film Documentaire de Lussas, Filmer le travail

In Brussels, in the window of what looks like a shop, coloured letters say: La petite école (The Little School). There two women, Marie and Juliette, have set up a small school that takes children, whose parents are often exiles or refugees, who have never been to school and gives them a time to adapt to such an essentially strange place: a school. In this new in-between place they have invented and constantly need to reinvent, Marie and Juliette work with the children, and they also think, talk, confront other settings, both academic and institutional. This is a film that attentively observes a place, two women and some children. It’s a film about intelligence, about a constant to and fro between practice and theory: we think because we do, we do because we think. Words become actions, action generates new words. It’s exciting to see this: in a small place in the city two people are working on reality, and in doing so, as they make a reality they think about it and question it. Gradually they come to question the very place they come from, the place through which we all pass, school. Without realising, we have our certainties stripped away and at the same time we are shown that there, where the certainties come to an end, something can be done, something happens.

Pablo García Canga

El polvo ya no nubla nuestros ojos

Colectivo Silencio

Say of us [...] that we live in a country where the fires drew on the night-time cliffs the red shining of sickles and hammers.

Montserrat Álvarez

Peru, 2022, 25 min, super-8 to DCP, colour, SpanishQuechuaAshaninka

Spanish Premiere

Cinematography Luis Enrique Tirado / Sound Christian Ñeco / Music Iván Santa

María / Production Bergman was right

Films and Cineclub de Lambayeque / Festival de Lima-Filmocorto, Festival Internacional de Mar del Plata, Festival de Cine de Trujillo, Corriente Encuentro Latinoamericano de Cine de No Ficción, Transcinema Festival de Cine, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

2021 was the bicentenary year of Peru as a nation, though these last few years have not been its only ones. They have been full of fires. The first film by Colectivo Silencio marks this anniversary with a national memory that does not belong to the official celebrations, a memory of resistance that is no longer just a memory because today there are trenches in its streets. The film falls back on another history that belongs to it, not on the fiction that is a country, but on the history of film, of a political/poetic film that accompanies, that has accompanied on the screen voices, bodies, history lessons and a land that refuses to be just landscape. In different shots documents are read aloud, making them indelible, proof of past and future struggles: indigenous and peasant, rural and urban workers, women and dissidences. Each of them shines with a light of its own, and a beauty that springs from the wish to put a lasting memory back on record, to take victims mourned only by those closest to them and make them live on in memory. Everything has a time to be looked at and admired, everything that has been taken away and, by being filmed, is returned to them: the sky, the pasture, the cement, the street lights, the outside walls of a burnt-down building, the graves of the dead. Injustices that the date shows are old are strung together, as if those white national struggles —the wars of independence— had left a land free from slaveries. As if they hadn’t carried on.

Lucía Salas

Eventide Sharon Lockhart

USA, 2022, 35 min, DCP, colour, silent Spanish Premiere

Cinematography Simon Gulergun / Sound Tom Ozanich / Editing May Rigler / Production

Lockhart Studio / Selected filmography

Rudzienko (2016), Pine Flat (2005), Double Tide (2009), Podwórka (2009), Lunch Break (2008), Teatro Amazonas (1999) / Toronto International Film Festival, Viennale

Night falls on a rocky beach. The evening is almost over, but the last part passes slowly. Almost so slowly that it’s hard to know whether it will ever get dark, or even whether it was daytime before. This is immersion, this is its effect: the body itself disappears, leaving only eyes and ears. While the sky creates the suspense of its own opacity and blue takes over, a light appears among the rocks. Is it the reflection of something or is there someone there? In a game of darknesses, in Eventide it’s hard to tell whether people imitate the sky or it’s the sky that wants to be a person. There’s a competition between sky and earth, each with its own possibilities. Is it magic? No, they’re the Perseids, seen from Gotland in Sweden. A miracle that’s a little natural, and also a little the result of the dark room, of the passing of time and of sitting —as we aren’t often— with our eyes accustomed to seeing black on black. The most recent film by Sharon Lockhart, made with a small bunch of friends and their hands (with their mobiles) shining, explores the strangeness of a moment when the eyes aren’t the object able to capture the most light and shade. Farewell —perhaps— to purely human perception.

Lucía Salas

Maayo Wonaa Keerol

Alassane Diago

SenegalGermany-France, 2022, 105 min, DCP, colour, French-WolofPeul-Arabic Spanish

Premiere

Cinematography

Michel K. Zongo / Sound Michel Tzagli and Philippe Grivel / Editing Catherine

Gouze and Alassane

Diago / Production

Michel Klein (Les Films

Hatari), Katy Lena

Ndiaye (IndigoMood Films), Raphael

Pillosio (L’atelier documentaire)

and Heino Deckert (Ma.ja.de.

Filmproduktions) / Selected filmography

Rencontrer mon père (2018), Tribunal du fleuve (2017), La vie n’est pas immobile (2012), Tristesse dans un bar et Dégoût à l’épicerie (2012), Les larmes de l’émigration (2010) / Semaine de la Critique de Locarno, IDFA, Göteborg Film Festival, Black Movie Festival International de Films Indépendants

In Africa, since colonisation there have been frontiers running for hundreds of kilometres in straight lines across the desert. Others take a geographical feature as their pretext, for example the course of a river. When a frontier is invented, groups of people are divided. This is what happened to the inhabitants of Mauritania and Senegal from 1960 onwards. That river frontier, as well as being arbitrary, was superimposed on deeper divisions. Arab and Berber herdsmen had been fighting since ancient times with black farmers on the river banks. In April 1988, the flocks of some Mauritanian herdsmen went to graze for the millionth time on the land of Senegalese farmers. Three years of war followed, on both sides of the border. Tens of thousands of people were brutally killed. Thousands more were expelled and never returned. Alassane Diago, who was three years old when the war began, talks to Abdoulaye Diop, who has not returned to Mauritania since then. This is the prologue to this film, which also aims to serve as a provisional act of reconciliation. Alassane brings together witnesses and survivors on the Senegalese side of the river, wrapped in the most beautiful fabrics you have ever seen, in the shade of the ginkgo trees, under a small fabric canopy. If words can be as eloquent as gestures in this place, it’s because they’re surrounded by an attentive silence. Outside, life shines beside the water, chores, animals, children.

Manuel Asín

Miyama, Kyoto Prefecture

Rainer Komers

Japan-Germany, 2022, 97 min, DCP, colour, GermanJapanese International Premiere

Cinematography

Rainer Komers / Sound Michel Klöfkorn, Oscar Stiebitz and Jonathan Schorr / Editing and co-author

Gregor Bartsch / Production Rainer Komers / Selected filmography Barstow, California (2018), Kursmeldungen (2017), 25572 Büttel (2012), Milltown, Montana (2009), Kobe (2006), Lettischer Sommer (1992), Zigeuner in Duisburg (1980) / DOK Leipzig, Duisburger Filmwoche, Blicke-Filmfestival des Ruhrgebiets

The small town of Miyama, fifty kilometres from Kyoto, is visited by flocks of tourists attracted by its traditional houses. But however special it may be as a town, its inhabitants’ work must go on. The rice fields need preparing and sowing, the animals need feeding and slaughtering, people have to go hunting and fishing, clearing and fencing the fields, to cut trees down in the forest. Under the overcast sky, everything is verdant and fertile, but it takes work. Is this life all work? There is also time to learn to play traditional instruments, to eat and drink with others after practising. This is how it’s been for generations. Work and leisure are repeated as life follows its course. “As I’m Japanese”, says one of the residents, “When I die I expect to disappear”, as she recalls the annual cycle of the cherry blossom. So we accompany the inhabitants of Miyama in this series of almost folkloric scenes that illustrate the daily cycles, until we realise that, at some unknown point in the film, in some cut between sequences, we’ve started to subtly realise that its charm lies in the cyclical rather than the dramatic. We see the process of things without wanting to know where they are heading; a new disposition towards the film grows up in us.

There is also a westerner living in Miyama, Uwe, a German who has been in Japan for thirty years. The first sign we see of his enthusiasm for the country is that he is a capable player of the shakuhachi, the Japanese traditional flute. The way he throws himself into everything he does has a curious effect: at once integrated and foreign in this small place, Uwe appears to be the bearer of the awareness that’s needed for everything to carry on flowing without interruption. And yet, a fundamental, universal rule says that the only thing that is forever is change. This comes along as gently as the passing of the days. It’s through Uwe that we learn once again that change is the flip side of constancy, that insisting on the same has new consequences of its own and where there is no variation there is paralysis. A whole series of mysteries that we must explore in the same spirit. Bárbara Mingo Costales. Bárbara Mingo Costales

Nagyapám kertje

Varga Gábor

Hungry, 2021, 24 min, DCP, colour, Hungarian Spanish Premiere

Cinematography Varga Gábor / Editing Csenge

Hegedüs / Selected filmography Csendes

környék - A quiet neighborhood (2020) / Odense Film Festival, Budapest International Documentary Festival

Varga Gábor’s grandfather is a man who, as a child, ate cherries down to the stone, and made his living dancing on ladders (as he demonstrates for us by walking over a stepladder like a crane fly). He seems to have spent his whole life working, doing things constantly, because he likes it. He digs the ground, repairs a bicycle bell to make a child happy, perches up on the roof to mend it, and looks after his animals and his garden devotedly. He radiates affection as he sings to his rabbits, picks apart a corn cob for his pigeons, strokes the new-born chicks and roasts pork over the fire with his grandson. He says that he does what he does today thinking of future generations. What will become of this little world when he’s not there?

It might seem that Nagyapám Kertje is something that has been done many times, that we have seen many times: a film by a young film student about their grandfather. Nor does it adopt an unprecedented or experimental approach; in fact, he goes about it with total simplicity. However, despite the humility of this début film, it manages to harness the film-maker’s ability to show us in a few minutes something as vast as the passing of life, something as delicate as the process of growing old, of changing from a strong, tirelessly hard-working person to a fragile one. As fragile as the little world in his garden.

Miguel Zozaya

Notas para una película Ignacio Agüero

Chile-France, 2022, 105 min, DCP, B&W, French-SpanishMapudungun (mapuche) Spanish Premiere

Cinematography David Bravo / Sound Carlo Sanchez and Andrès Polonsky / Editing Ignacio Agüero, Claudio Aguilar and Jacques Comets / Production Agüero y Asociado Ltda / Selected filmography

Gustave Verniory wrote Diez años en Araucanía. 1889-1899 about a decade he spent in Chile beginning when he was just under twenty-three and an engineer there to develop a railway network. He found himself in a country he thought was exotic, and soon learned was more than just the backdrop for his adventures. Notas para una película [Notes for a Film] is one of those films that takes a “What if...?” that comes true. What would happen if we could make two times -past and present- coexist, if we could tell those in the past what they did not know or not hear then. What would happen if author and character, one from the 19th century and the other in the 21st, could take the train of history, the one that’s never supposed to come along twice. Agüero and Verniory travel Araucania recreating memories and seeking out others that weren’t there before. They roam about in search of the film (unless the film finds them first), travelling through space but also time. they go to a Mapuche lof to visit those who were displaced then, to talk to a place where memory is oral, where the record of a genocide travels in the form of family and community memories. A film made of books, places and other films, objects that could have witnessed that was and is done in the name of progress. A far-off past that is tied in a flash to the most recent past.

Lucía Salas

Nunca subí el Provincia (2019), Como me da la gana II (2016), El otro día (2012), Aquí se construye (o Ya no existe el lugar donde nací) (2000), Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), Como me da la gana (1985) / IDFA, Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar de Plata, Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia, Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine de La Habana

Notre village Comes Chahbazian

Belgium, 2022, 67 min, DCP, colour, Armenian European Premiere

Cinematography

Comes Chahbazian / Sound Jaouen Le Fur and Pauline PirisNury / Editing Pauline

Piris-Nury / Production

Matière Première / Selected filmography

Ici-Bas (2010), Untitled (2002), Y.U.L. (2002), À Suivre (2001)

The houses here are made of grey stone. That’s the way it is, as they say, and if they don’t go with the green of the surrounding woods it’s their problem. We make life with whatever we have to hand. The places we live in impose themselves in some ways. Some of these are violent. Like for example being in between two communities with a long-standing conflict that flares up again and again. Then men are sent to war, teenagers die at the front and women become everybody’s widows and mothers.

The disintegration of the Soviet Uni9on destroys the lives of the inhabitants of Artsaj, between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Old grudges about frontiers and property flare up once more. Since the late 1980s they have been forced to live not exactly among ruins, but in a state of alert where everything is provisional. Upon visiting “our village”, we can see how life goes on despite everything, how children play with whatever they find, the bee keeper starts making honey again, the nurse fills the syringes, the fisherman pulls up a net full of fish, the butcher slaughters the pig, and also how the non-human world gets on with its own life: the spider weaves its web, the cat licks up the pig’s blood. All these goings-on seem to be imbued with a hidden meaning. What vestiges are we looking for among these pictures?

So let’s allow the neighbours to tell us what happened. Through their words we might be able to better understand their grief. Under a lighting that creates a theatrical air, each one, rather than explaining, lists the events that have made up their history. The memory of the fateful day when everything went wrong inevitably becomes a ballad that takes up the subterranean currents of all the feelings and preserves them. Like this they take on a new power, almost like omens. This stylisation of the production, alternating with sequences of a naturalist nature, illustrate the biblical adage that one who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind. That words are a symbol but they manifest themselves in the flesh is something that in “our village” we learn with blood.

Bárbara Mingo Costales

Teléfono, Navidad

Malena Zambrani

Argentina, 2022, 14 min, DCP, colour, Spanish World

Sound Santiago Haddad / Editing

Malena Zambrani

Now that ones and zeros, yeses and nos have for many become the most valuable fuel, Malena Zambrani shows us the sources of what we pompously call “information”. What is her starting point? A situation that might sound like a joke: the compulsive congratulatory calls of a mother and her son, addicted to the telephone, on what might be the peak of their addiction: Christmas Eve. Festive symbolism triumphs, with everything it mobilises in terms of sentiments. There’s a climate that the film successfully captures, in a tone of laughter but not mocking, rather a kind of joy and joviality (a rare, difficult register to achieve). The topic of the film, recreational telephoning, so to speak, may seem capricious as much as subversive, as the film succeeds in showing, without any solemnity and without saying it as such, how far in recent decades the privatisation of the telephone has become the core of our domination and servitude. This can be seen off-centre, or even better in the mirror. The film wittily, subtly focuses on what to others might seem imperceptible or trivial. The thing about mirrors is that they invert what doesn’t seem to be inverted: the telephone Baby and Julio abuse so much is no longer today’s telephone; its antiquated uses might seem even more immoderate than our own (they call more people, further away, and nobody ever manages to talk to them -they’re always “engaged”). Calls for them always go in a centrifugal spiral, from their house to the world. Seeing this in the mirror makes us stop and think. The narrow space in the hall with the little table for the telephone is for Malena nothing less than what the South Seas or the pole were for Flaherty or Murnau. Manuel

Asín

Premiere

Tembiapo pyharegua (Trabajo nocturno)

Christian Bagnat & Elvira Sánchez Poxon

Spain, 2022, 120 min, DVCPAL to DCP, colour, GuaraniSpanish

World Premiere

Sound Organic Audio Studio / Editing Elvira Sánchez Poxon and Christian Bagnat / Selected filmography Los Ángeles (2011), Los empleados de Kaufmann (2008-2009)

It seems that dreaming is the real night work, and night is the time that gives form to this mass made of present, past, future and everything that’s invented. The work the mind does when we aren’t watching. It’s everything that isn’t —really— work, but free time, truly free and filled with curiosity. Tembiapo pyharegua follows the nights (which are sometimes days, moments of spiritual night) of a migrant community in Cuenca, people from Paraguay who speak Guaraní, among themselves and with the film. It follows them in different ways, as in episodes. There are stories about birds captured by kings, coming-out dances, first love, sections in which the story of migration merges into the landscape, the desire to return to a place of their own..., as if the film wanted to think of an infinite number of forms for a flat plane to take, because there are an infinite number of ways of being far from home. The thing about migration is that it happens all the time, in a story with no end because life splits up and is repeated: life there, where one sometimes is like a ghost; life here, where one lives somewhat absently, running the risk of becoming invisible. There is a shared dream, but one with infinite variations: going back. And then? A dream that might be anxious nightmares. This dream is the film, which is a bright, artificial, democratic night. Lucía Salas

Tótem Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico

México-Chile, 2022, 65 min, digital to DCP, colour, Spanish European Premiere

Cinematography and editing Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico / Sound and music

Sinewavelover / Production Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico & Pequén Producciones / Selected filmography Bodegón 1 (2022), Meteor (2022), Theses on Cavern Cinema (2021), Cabo Tuna or the Management of the Sky (2021) / Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogotá

“In nature we never experience anything in isolation, but everything is connected to something else in front of it, beside it, under or over it”. Goethe said this, and was quoted by Eisenstein. Tótem, the work of a collective named Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico, is made of connections. Between vision and sound, between past, present and future, between essay and narrative. Tótem is a film made twice: one voice that recites an essay about forced disappearances in Mexico (their history, their forms and their causes), and another voice that explains the finding of an Olmec head lost in the bottom of a river. But Tótem is not just made up of words, it is also made up of images. Images that do not match what the words are saying, yet gradually start to match, distant and close at the same time; in the remains of a small boat our mind starts to see an Olmec head, in a flock of birds we see the multiplication of criminal organisations. All the time we are seeing and hearing more than what we really see and hear, because in the meeting between image and sound something else emerges, a meaning and a form. But also, the film does not limit itself to describing the past and the present. In describing the present of those struggling to find their lost ones, it proposes a new possible reality. By recounting the past, by describing the present, it proposes a future.

Pablo García Canga

Other Times Are Coming | Es nahen andere Zeiten

The films of Peter Nestler

This programme is an introduction to the work of filmmaker Peter Nestler. Its title is borrowed from a poem by the Communist German poet Johannes R. Becher, written in exile in 1941-1944, and quoted by Nestler in a text about the responsibility of the filmmaker and the political crisis in Chile in the 1970s. The call to resistance, hope and change has been a constant in Nestler’s work since he began making films in the early 1960s. As Nestler wrote, the greatest responsibility of the filmmaker should be “to acknowledge, to recognise and to say with others: this must be changed, or that must be preserved, or not overlooked”. From his early portraits of rural and industrial communities in Germany and England fallen by the wayside of the ‘economic miracle’, to his ‘biographies of objects’ documenting the lives of materials and their production processes, to his numerous investigations into the histories of persecution, oppression and resistance, of fascism and its frightful continuation, the films of Peter Nestler have never stopped digging and unveiling what is commonly overlooked or wilfully suppressed, in defiance of historical amnesia and political inertia.

From the 1960s until today, Nestler has directed over sixty films, many of them in collaboration with his wife Zsóka Nestler, as well as with other filmmakers and artists. Nestler studied painting and printing, worked as a merchant sailor and a forester and was an actor in feature films. His first film, Am Siel, from 1962, was the first of a series of works about the transformations of the rural world in Germany. The films from the 1960s show how the lives of the working class were affected by the changes brought about by economic and industrial policies in West Germany. They deal with the violent legacies of Nazi Germany, their continuation and consequences in the postwar social-democratic Germany, as well as with the histories of political resistance and labour movements.

Formally, his filmmaking practice went against the principles of direct cinema which defined much of the documentary filmmaking of his time, also in Germany -the films take a step back to research, dig deep and analyse each situation for what it entails. In 1965-1966, together with Reinald Schnell, Nestler made a film in Greece, Von Griechenland, presaging the emergence of the military dictatorship only two years before it was established. The clearly expressed political positions in his films went against the political consensus and anti-communist sentiment prevalent at the time, which made it difficult for Nestler to continue working in Germany. In 1968 he relocated to Sweden, his mother’s birthplace, where he continued to create most of his work the following decades. He worked for public television, producing, buying and dubbing programmes for children and young adults, and also working on his personal projects in collaboration with Zsóka Nestler.

Many of these films were concerned with the criminal legacies of Nazi Germany (and European collaboration), its past and how they persist in the present. The films reveal narratives of violence, injustice and resistance. Works such as Zigeuner sein (1970), about the persecutions and injustices committed by the Nazis against the Roma and Sinti communities and their resistance are among the most important works made by Peter and Zsóka Nestler. An anti-fascist, anti-war, ecological, internationalist, and humanist stance runs through all the films.

This period also saw Nestler making films focused on international politics and struggles, against the war in Vietnam or on the situation in Chile (often working with the Chilean community in exile in Sweden). Peter and Zsóka Nestler have worked on several films about the working conditions of migrants, political exiles and ethnic minorities (in Sweden and elsewhere). Always working for television, they made a series of documentary essays about the way objects and materials are produced, the histories of capital, manufacturing and industry. These works show the filmmakers’ interest in traditional crafts and in the lives of artists who express their politics through their work. As he said in an interview, “visual art and sculpture was for both me and Zsóka a way to understand the world, to live consciously, to enjoy beauty but also to see -to dare seeing- the abysm of human existence”.

Working for young audiences allowed them to develop a didactical, formally clear, informative and engaging film process. The films never cease to explore the complex relations between sound and image through the use of narration, testimonies and music, brought into a dialectical relationship with materials collected from a diverse range of sources (photos, texts, prints, music, extracts from other films). The distinct use of voiceover in Nestler’s films rejects the conventions of neutral television documentary narration, offering instead an active involvement with the subjects.

From the end of the 1980s onwards, Peter Nestler again made films in Germany, working for the first time in feature documentaries. These included films about traditional crafts and the history of the people who make them (Zeit, 1992), the centuries-long history and persecution of Jews in Frankfurt (Die Judengasse, 1988) and the histories of resistance against national socialism (Die Verwandlung des guten Nachbarn, 2002). He has also produced a series of finely crafted travelogues, inspired by his strong commitment to the preservation of nature and of local and indigenous cultures (Die Nordkalotte, 1991, Pachamama-nuestra tierra, 1995). The last years mark a continuity in his work, with remarkable films, for example on the work that Pablo Picasso did during his stay in Vallauris (Picasso in Vallauris, 2021) and even more recently a diptych that takes up the theme of injustice committed against the Roma and Sinti people and their resistance (Unrecht und Widerstand, 2022 and Der offene Blick, 2022).

Opening session of the festival

Die Donau rauf

Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler

Sweden, 1969, 28 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, colour, German

Zeit

Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler

Germany, 1992, 43 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, colour, German

Die Donau rauf (1969), made in collaboration with Zsóka Nestler, is a slow-moving journey up the Danube revealing many-layered narratives unearthed from the ancient and recent past blending with the slow progression of the riverboat, the landscape and images of people at work. The film addresses the cultural, social and political history of the river by bringing together scattered histories, from remains found on the riverbanks to the history of shipbuilding and commerce between the two world wars, from the peasants’ revolt in the 17th century to the horror of the Holocaust (through a poem by Miklós Radnóti read by Zsóka Nestler). Zeit is a film that is at the heart of Peter and Zsóka’s practice and their interest in traditional art forms and the people who make them. In the film six painters and artists from Hungarian villages talk about their lives and display their works for the camera. The film conveys the generosity shared in this exchange between the artists and the filmmakers, who make a unique portrait about the craft behind these works, the freedom of those who make them and the way they represent a personal and collective history.

Session 1

Chilefilm

Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler

Sweden, 1974, 23 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, B&W, German

Mi país

Peter Nestler

Sweden, 1981, 7 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, colour, silent

Pachamama-nuestra tierra

Peter Nestler

Germany, 1995, 90 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, colour, Spanish

Chilefilm is an introduction to the background of the military coup in Chile using historical documents, drawings and music. The film is a plea for the cause of the Unidad Popular: “There is a connection between the terrible poverty of the many and the enormous wealth of a few”. The film was produced for young audiences for Swedish Public Television and it was never broadcast. Mi país is a short visual essay on the history of Chile made up of popular works by young exiled Chileans in Sweden with paintings by Nicolas de la Cruz and Jorge Kuhn, engravings by Rolando Pérez, music for the Indian harp by Adrián Miranda. Pachamama-nuestra tierra is a travelogue filmed in Ecuador. Peter Nestler wrote about it: “The film is about the indigenous cultures of Ecuador, of what is past and what is preserved, of destruction and resistance, of persisting in new ways, of music in the villages high up in the Andes, of music in the cities and in a tropical climate among descendants of African slaves. The film is about Earth, about working with Earth, sacred to the indigenous people. An account of beauty that silences, of friendliness, also grief”.

Session 2

Spanien!

Peter Nestler, Zsóka Nestler and Taisto Jalamo

Federal Republic of Germany, 1973, 43 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, B&W, German

Von Griechenland

Peter Nestler in collaboration with Reinald Schnell

Federal Republic of Germany, 1965, 28 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, B&W, German

Zigeuner sein

Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler

Sweden, 1970, 47 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, B&W, German

Shot in Spain, Finland, Sweden, and West Germany, Spanien! is a film about internationalism and solidarity, using personal testimonies from former members of the International Brigades who joined the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War and from members of the Comisiones Obreras. Von Griechenland describes the political situation in Greece in 1964-1965, two years before the coup d’etat which led to the military dictatorship. Peter Nestler said about the film: “It was a tense period when we got there. I filmed the demonstrations and at the same time we were looking for the traces -the historical traces- of the times of the German occupation and the resistance movements against the Germans”. One of Peter and Zsóka Nestler’s most important works, Zigeuner sein confronts the persecution of the Roma and Sinti peoples in Germany under Nazism and its persistence after the war: “In the sixties I learned of this constant injustice, was made aware of it, especially by the works of the painter Otto Pankok, whom I met in 1965, and by the social work of Birgitta Wolf, by the writings of Hermann Langbein, who was one of the main witnesses in the Auschwitz trial. I learned about the uninterrupted discrimination against the minority in Germany and Austria, where everything revolved around reconstruction, about economic advancement. The war crimes were put to rest, and the many perpetrators, former SS members and criminal police officers, as well as the ‘racial hygiene researchers’, returned to their offices and positions, continuing to discriminate and exclude the Sinti and Roma for decades”. Peter and Zsóka Nestler consciously used the derogatory term ‘zigeuner’ (Gypsies) in the title in 1970 to expose the violence that it entails. Their film begins with the words: “Those whom we call ‘gypsies’ call themselves ‘Roma,’ which means ‘people’. Many of them feel afraid when they hear the word ‘gypsy’. They fear it could all happen again”.

Session 3

Fos-sur-Mer

Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler

Sweden, 1972, 24 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, B&W, German

Das Warten

Peter Nestler

Sweden, 1985, 6 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, colour, German

Die Nordkalotte

Peter Nestler

Germany, 1991, 90 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, colour, German

Fos-sur-Mer is set against the backdrop of the industrialisation of the commercial port of Fos-sur-Mer, northwest of Marseille. He gives a damning account of the port’s development into an industrial park since the late 1960s and the destruction the area has suffered. It highlights the poor working conditions of some 7,000 migrant workers who work and live on this industrial site, many of them from the Maghreb. A plea against the destruction of the photo archives of Swedish national television, Das Warten tells the story of a tragic mining accident that occurred in Northern Silesia in the 1930s, in which dozens of miners lost their lives. The film saves from oblivion one of the “many disasters in these years of rationalisation” and highlights the violence caused by extractivism and the exploitation of natural resources. Die Nordkalotte is one of Nestler’s most remarkable films. It was shot between Sweden, Finland, Norway and the USSR and documents the devastating impact of industrialization on the landscape and lives and culture of the region’s indigenous peoples. It is a tribute to the Sami people and their resistance, who in their own words talk about the destruction of their livelihood, of nature and the importance of preserving their customs and language. Nestler dedicated this film to his friends, the filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.

Sessions 4 & 5 Unrecht und Widerstand

Peter Nestler

Germany-Austria, 2022, 113 min, HD, colour, German

Der offene Blick

Peter Nestler

Germany-Austria, 2022, 101 min, HD, colour, German

This diptych deals with various forms of resistance of the German and Austrian Sinti and Roma throughout the last eighty years. It is about rebellion against injustice and their insistence on dignity and fairness. Unrecht und Widerstand tells the story of Romani Rose, his family and his fellow fighters, their work for justice, and their enduring resistance and perseverance. It is the painful story of a minority between trauma and self-assertion, which suffered violence and official harassment throughout the post-war period up to the present day and was only recognized thanks to the civil rights movement. For Roma and Sinti who survived the genocide, exclusion, poverty and official harassment were part of everyday life. The Porajmos, the genocide of the minority, was not officially recognized until 1982. In this film

Peter Nestler describes the long way out of lawlessness and discrimination into the civil rights movement. Their tireless commitment testifies to civil courage and a sense of citizenship, to their resolute commitment to the coexistence of different cultures and to a forward-looking understanding of democracy. The film works with archive material and commentaries and is framed by a conversation with Romani Rose about his family history and his experiences as a civil rights activist.

Der Offene Blick details the methods of resistance of the Roma and Sint. The second film of the diptych features a number of artists who throughout history have expressed their personal experiences in rich and open ways through writing, painting, film and music, using their work as a form of cultural celebration and remembrance but also of revolt. Rosa Gitta Martl and her daughter Nicole Sevid read short texts in memory of the people who died in the Upper Austrian “Gypsy camp” of Weyer. Apart from a series of 32 colour slides photographed in 1941, there are no other remembrances of these people. The film highlights the work of artists from the past and the present. It commemorates the work of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013), an Austrian writer, painter, singer, activist and survivor of the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen, whose work expresses revolt and resistance. Film-maker friend Karin Berger recalls her work, which had a great influence on other Roma and Sinti. Spanish-born painter Lita Cabellut works across media, using painting, video and dance to address social issues such as discrimination. The strength of her work is expressed in the film. She talks about her work as an art director for a film about Carmen Chaplin, about the presumably Roma background of her world-famous grandfather. Film scholar Radmila Mladenova discusses the relationship between cinema and photography and the portrayal of racist stereotypes, for example in an early film by D. W. Griffith or László Moholy-Nagy, and offers an alternative perspective seen, for example, in photographs that show other ways of portraying the Sinti and Roma in a more just and egalitarian way. The film is accompanied by the music of the orchestra Roma und Sinti Philharmoniquer, which brings together musicians from all over Europe to talk about their experiences with music. In recent years, things have changed for the better for the artists. For example, the Kai Dikhas Gallery and Foundation, under the direction of Moritz Pankok, offers artists a continuous forum to develop and exhibit their work.

Session 6 Am Siel

Peter Nestler in collaboration with Kurt Ulrich

Federal Republic of Germany, 1962, 13 min, 35 mm transfer DCP, B&W, German

Ödenwaldstetten

Peter Nestler in collaboration with Kurt Ulrich

Federal Republic of Germany, 1964, 36 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, B&W, German

Die Judengasse

Peter Nestler

Federal Republic of Germany, 1988, 44 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, colour, German

Peter Nestler’s first film, made in collaboration with Kurt Ulrich, is a portrait of a small and quiet village in East Frisia in Germany, seen from the perspective of an old dike sluice. The text, written and narrated by poet and artist Robert Wolfgang Schnell, speaks about the history and life of the village and the toil of the fishermen. The film “mirrors Germany in a village”, as Nestler says, evoking the war and the change caused by the disappearance of traditional livelihoods. Ödenwaldstetten is also a portrait of change, a film Nestler shot as a freelance assignment in the Swabian village of Ödenwaldstetten. It shows the life and work of the villagers and how much the process of industrialisation affected life in this agricultural community. We witness how handicraft and traditional agricultural tools are discarded and replaced by high-tech equipment and assembly line production. The film is also about the history of Germany and its relentless economic path after the war. The discovery of remains of the Jewish alley in Frankfurt motivated Nestler to reconstruct the centuries-long history of the Jews in the city in Die Judengasse. Despite the murderous period of German fascism, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, an astonishing amount of historical evidence about Frankfurt’s Jews has survived. Nestler’s film traces this history from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Foco Punto de Vista

April 2023 in Filmoteca de Navarra

Stoff (1)

Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler

Sweden, 1974, 30 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, B&W, German

Die Römerstraße im Aostatal

Peter Nestler

Germany, 1999, 89 min, 16 mm transfer DCP, colour, German

Stoff (1) is part of a series of films made for television and aimed at young audiences. The series was dedicated to the history and techniques behind the production of objects, materials (paper, letterpress, fabrics, etc.), highlighting the differences between artisanal and industrial production and the labour and economic relations involved in each of these methods of making things. Die Römerstraße im Aostatal, which was unavailable in its complete version for many years and is presented here in a newly restored version, is a film documenting the area of the Italian Aosta Valley through its political, economic and cultural history. It is another remarkable work in which Nestler travels along the Roman road, a central artery used as a trade route for millennia, unearthing its history to better shed light on its present, looking at various aspects such as the traditions of craftsmanship and agriculture or the impact of industrial closures. The film makes a masterful use of sound, with the local dialect and traditional music playing an important role.

PUNTO DE VISTA COLLECTION Se acercan otros tiempos

El cine de Peter Nestler

Vol. 1

Peter y Zsóka Nestler

Textos, imágenes, conversaciones

Vol. 2

Reinald Schnell y Peter Nestler

Campesinos que pintan cuadros

This year’s publication accompanies the retrospective “Other Times are Coming | Es nahen andere Zeiten. The Films of Peter Nestler”. Published in two volumes, the first is a miscellany of documents about both Peter and Zsóka Nestler and some of their closest collaborators, who insist on the collective approach that their work has always followed: texts and interviews by and with Zsóka Nestler, Rainer Komers, Reinald and Robert W. Schnell, and Peter himself, several of his scripts and the filming diary of one of Peter’s most recent films, Picasso in Vallauris (2021), written and illustrated by Bassem Pablo, together with plentiful graphic material and an annotated filmography stretching over six decades of work.

The second volume is a reproduction of Bauern malen Bilder [Peasants Paint Pictures], a book with photographs and texts by Peter Nestler and Reinald Schnell published in 1974 in Germany. In 1964, on the way to Greece, they heard about a village in Yugoslavia, Kovacica, “the village of the peasant painters”. There, just as night was falling, they asked a man where they could stay. They ended up in a guest house with straw mattresses, and there they discovered that this small locality had seventeen working painters. They visited the village several times, getting to know the artists and their families and observing their work and their techniques. Nestler took photographs, Schnell took notes and from conversations between food, drink and paintings a book emerged, a book that is now being published for the first time in a language other than German, also fulfilling its authors’ initial plan: for the paintings to be reproduced in colour, as in the original edition they could only be printed in black and white for financial reasons.

The retrospective and the publication are the work of Portuguese programmer Ricardo Matos Cabo, responsible among other things for the Peter Nestler retrospective held in London in 2012-2013, and Argentinian programmer, critic and film-maker Lucía Salas, a member of the festival programming committee. They were also supported by the Goethe-Institut Madrid.

Far from the trees

Once upon a time there was a holm oak as grand as a forest; next to it, the other trees seemed like grass. They had decorated it with ribbons and wreaths, and the nymphs often danced around it, hand-in-hand. The king of that country ordered that it be chopped down for he wanted the timber to build a palace. No one obeyed him, so he took the axe himself and the holm oak howled from the blow of the iron. Everyone was astonished; a servant who tried to stop him was decapitated by the king. From the tree, grown pale, blood flowed. It finally fell. Then Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, the “bearer of the seasons”, commanded Hunger to nestle itself in the guts of the king. Hunger obeyed and the king sent for that which is bred in the sea, on the land and in the air, he demanded food from food. Supplies that would have fed entire towns and cities were not enough for him, and the more he guzzled, the hungrier he was. He ate his fortune. He ate his father’s fortune. He sold his daughter. Nothing sated him, nothing, and “he started to bite off his own extremities, feeding his body, the poor fool, by tearing it to pieces”. The poor fool could have been called Capitalism.

This film program stares into the abyss that now separates us from the trees. It considers the production of essential goods over the length (and width) of time and, consequently, pays tribute to original unproductivity, non-industrial modes of production, subsistence economies, and animals. It pays tribute to some humans too, all artists of their trade. Why? For love of our world, in defence of our world, to stoke the desire (or imagination) needed to defend it, so that the Samoan islands or the Orinoco delta do not vanish beneath the waters, so that Sicily or the Traslasierra valley do not vanish beneath the flames. Even though they will vanish. And because, as a poster found on the lower riverbank of the Ebro at the beginning of the seventies proclaimed: “They call development a miracle, but the work of a miracle is distribution”.

Curated and notes by Miriam Martín

Session 1 Moana

Robert J. Flaherty and Frances H. Flaherty

USA, 1926, 92 min, silent

Mosori Monika Chick Strand

USA, 1970, 20 min, English

The Flahertys had a dream, the dream of the Southern seas, of progress stopped, of paradise. And Moana, the film they shot in Samoa, is that dream. For a year they busied themselves with reconstructing reality so that it appeared intact, so they could go back to when food was taro root and fishes were fished by hand. Moana, the main character in Moana, is a beautiful creature, just like all those and everything around him. There is such sensuality in the surfaces that the bronze of bodies is perceptible, the greens, the blues that are not there. The salty, warm breeze blows. These people live in the realm of freedom without having endured the realm of necessity and their life is full of grace. It is no wonder that they smile by default. They live in a world not yet divided: “work” is confused with play, or with art, so much so that it becomes a crude notion, leaving no option but to put quotation marks around it. Several coconuts will be had in unforgettable ways. A mulberry branch will be metamorphosised into a dress. And our main character will end up tattooed from the waist down, subjecting himself to a trial of pain that was invented, perhaps, in this world lacking in outright pain, so as not to forget that happiness exists. In Mosori Monika we will see what is unseen and we will hear what is unheard in Moana. First paradise and then paradise lost. Sorry, sorry. We will travel to another “fortunate latitude”, the Orinoco delta. Here the natives no longer live as they please; a mission of Franciscan nuns has set up shop. The warao woman Carmelita and the Spanish nun Isabel speak in a voice-over. The nun hurls to the wind recriminations that sound like a curse, like a horror film: ‘They don’t work. The Indians don’t work! They don’t do anything! They’re always sleeping in the hammocks! Only when they feel like it, they go fishing’. A foundational horror, if you will, that is enlarged in the images: the warao people unnecessarily dressed in Western clothing or Carmelita, on a visit to the nuns, being sent off with two bits of bread and a banana. The dream has been shattered and left behind is a reality that is almost withered, vile. Chick Strand gives, at least, the last word to Carmelita and the last image to the resplendent river.

Session 2

Lu tempu di li pisci spata

Vittorio de Seta

Italy, 1954, 11 min, no dialogue

Safare sayadi

Ebrahim Mokhtari

Iran, 1986, 28 min, Farsi

Drifters

John Grierson

United Kingdom, 1929, 41 min, silent

Vive la baleine

Chris Marker and Mario Ruspoli

France, 1972, 17 min, French

“The ugliest animal on earth is the white man”, but not in The Age of Swordfish. In 1954, in the Strait of Mesina, the beauty of the fishermen is on par with that of the fish which keeps them up at night. We say “fishermen” out of convention but what they do is hunt, embark on a one-to-one persecution (several men are required to act as one before the other animal: four rowers-arms, a lookout-eyes, a harpooner-stinger). During this almost equal persecution, time expands and contracts, coloured, like music, like in an action film. At the end of the day, the animal that is not one returns and dismembers, someone sings, and the children dance on the beach. There was 5 seconds left until il miracolo económico, until the end of this world.

We move away from the coast, the oars have disappeared, there is a motor and the rhythm changes. It slows down, curiously. A fishing boat sails out into the Persian Gulf in the close season, that is, after the fish have migrated. The skiff cannot follow them, due to its size and because traditional fishing consists of setting limits and accepting them. It is all about, in these circumstances, catching the stragglers. There are few and, on top of that, the seagulls eat them. Time stands still. The fishermen sing, of course. The crochet designs on their hats are an admirable sight, as with the way they fish, like a dancing body, with able and repetitive gestures that seem choreographed (by the very position of the camera, that modest magic).

We move ever further away from the coast. Blue water fishing, the North sea. We are warned from the beginning: the idyll of brown sails and village harbours is over; this is an epic of steam and steel. Chimneys, black smoke, the floating industry, the proletarianised fishermen. Three-kilometre-wide nets, the limits blur. Drifting from here to there, from fantasy to the documentary perspective, from the depths to the surface, splicing together the quiet dream of the fishermen and the disquieted dream of the herring twice under threat, from the nets and the conger eel, Grierson mustered all the aesthetic he could in the name of his self-declared unaesthetic, pedagogical cause. And he spotted a whale.

It is difficult to single out a herring. There are millions of them. They are a silvery current dragged and squashed by the proletarians of the sea. What is difficult, in the case of whales, is not to single them out. The very observer of the ugliness of the white man, which regains its ring of truth in Three Cheers for the Whale, provided irrefutable proof and he called it Moby Dick. “Whale, I love you”, says Chris Marker’s narrator and it turns out to be a logical way to feel after the engravings, the paintings, the frames, the blue overcome by the red of blood and a voiceover as thrilling as thought can be. Yes, thinking thrills: “The struggle, now, is between those who defend themselves defending nature and those who, destroying it, destroy themselves”. There are no more limits, only predation and a king who devores himself. Marker gives, at least, the last song to the whales.

Session 3

Det stora äventyret

Arne Sucksdorff

Sweden, 1953, 94 min, Swedish

The tales of foxes who steal chickens have a prologue, but it always goes untold. The Great Adventure tells this part of the story, finally: the fox steals chickens because she can no longer hunt in the forest. A lynx who wants to eat her has come to the forest. The lynx has been expelled from its usual forest because of, ta-da, deforestation. This is how the border conflict between the forest and the farm begins; they get the same sun and the same rain but not in the same way. Near the trees, the show is that of pure hunger and contact. Arne Sucksdorff patiently waited for the animals in his film, for years, to trap them in a fiction: the fox, a tragic character; the otter, a comical character, often with the corresponding musical prelude. When he films them up close, they are as captivating and inaccessible as any Hollywood star. Far from the trees, on the farm, the show is that of civilisation: work, property and arms. There is, however, a point of contact and it is the children, the border dwellers, Anders and Kjell. They save the otter from a hunter’s trap and set about… domesticating it. This will be their little secret, the door to a parallel existence, where ‘they play cowboys and Indians and the adults are the white people’. Of course. They, the otter Utti, the forest ‘who won’t tell on them’, Chris Marker’s whale, and the warao people are the Indians. Anders, the older child, will also discover the rigours of domestication. A willing and engrossed servant by day, by night he has nightmares about Utti’s still pure hunger, endless and at all hours. The otter must leave so that the child can remain a child.

Session 4 Schastye

Sergei Dvortsevoy

Kazakhstan, 1996, 25 min, Kazakh and Russian

Le Cochon

Jean-Michel Barjol and Jean Eustache

France, 1970, 50 min, no dialogue

Jamal Ibrahim Shaddad

Sudan, 1981, 14 min, no dialogue

Not all latitudes are fortunate for humans. At many, food does not fall from the trees, essentially because there are no trees. Not a single one. South of Kazakhstan, the steppe. A large plain, horizon split in two like on the open sea, nothing blocks the wind. This leads to gags about flying objects and a drunk lamenting because he wants to see the world. Without animals it would be impossible to live, and life is devoted to them. The nomadic shepherds guide them to where the grass grows, which is their paradise. Domestication stupefies them and replaces innate gestures (feeding from the udder) with devices (drinking milk from a pot); this also leads to gags. Sometimes devices do not replace anything, all they do is initiate animals in the habit of work and confront us viewers with the cries of pain coming from a camel who will migrate joined to his owner by the nose, with a new umbilical cord, abovementioned: that of work.

From the camel who resists the piercing to the pig that resists dying, but, Eustache said, “he dies within five minutes, like in a Hitchcock film”. South of France, the mountain. As with the sword fish, several men are needed to match a single pig, to match its size and importance. There was a time when humans hibernated, and each slaughter was practically the equivalent of an industrial counterrevolution. Eustache and Barjol film their own killing without infesting it with rhetoric. Between the anatomy lesson and rituals of the everyday, from the pig-form, step by step, other known forms emerge: the ham-form, the sausage-form… thanks to the skill of a bunch of slaughtermen who never take the ciggy out of their mouth. Do not let the blood curdle, do not let the bile spill, do not let the intestines tear. The meat that is left, no head nor limbs nor guts, becomes abstract, a painter’s theme.

The camel reappears and ascends from supporting actor to absolute protagonist. It has grown; it is, in fact, a dromedary, tall, imposing. And it is a moving character, with long eyelashes and long longings. He works at a sesame mill, blinded by blinkers, he turns and the camera turns, Shaddad mixes his cries with the screeching of the shafts and we realise what this is: hell. During the coffee break, the camel has a lie down and dreams. He dreams of a life of freedom, among his peers; the baby camels feed from the utter. He showcases his camel-like sensibility and his taste for disguise (in complicity with the camera, as there are objective, subjective and complicit shots). Back on the job, he imagines vengeance, our likeness, our brother. We say of someone that they “suffer like an animal” and the animal, as this film proves, is a human when it suffers.

Session 5

Trilla Sergio Bravo

Chile, 1959, 27 min, Spanish

Al-Sandawich Atteyat al-Abnoudy

Egypt, 1975, 12 min, no dialogue

Manoel de Oliveira

Portugal, 1959, 59 min, Portuguese

Did humankind domesticate wheat, or did wheat domesticate humankind? In the olden days, wheat was a wild grass that was perfectly capable of yielding and dispersing its seed; it was then made incapable and humankind starting threshing and winnowing, nothing short of a Faustian bargain. Then, some white men fantasised, alas, of turning the New World into some not-so-new fields of Castille and they filled their pockets with seed. Finally, Sergio Bravo climbed the Calquinhue hill to film the work made by dependent wheat. This is hard work, but it is easier than it could be thanks to a ‘group of helping hands’, el mingaco, a system of cooperative labour. Friends and family take part in harvesting, threshing and winnowing. The title reveals that the threshing season is the grand event, both socially and cinematographically speaking: the single women find a husband (as Violeta Parra sings) and the filmmaker surrenders to a photogenic herd of mares that turn without stopping and without implements, separating the wheat from the chaff with no more than their hooves. Like a serious merry-go-round.

During the harvest, said the voice in Trilla, “the kneading of the bread begins”. And that is how The Sandwich opens, fulfilling the promise of the film before. The women of Abnoud knead bread for their children, who are very small and who herd goats, living in symbiosis with them. This symbiosis, as Atteyat al-Abnoudy shows, is a state of grace. The wound of progress is barely noticeable from the railway line that takes tourists to the capital, and we will see one hundred children waiting for a train that, luckily, does not yet stop.

The train arrives, a sovietised Manoel de Oliveira arrives with Bread, a centripetal force, a film-tornado that incorporates the surrounding world into its movement. A world divided to infinity in which cinema unites without concealing the separation (of play and work, of work in senseless gestures and tasks like the cracks in a broken mirror). Bread traces the production of bread and when it includes what is left of the past in its present, the millstone and the sieve from The Sandwich reappear, the sickles and the cart from Trilla. But Oliveira is merciless with the past: he shows a windmill and then scorches it, like Zeus in the editing room; he shows a watermill and then questions the quality of the flour; the arms of a woman kneading in the trough are followed by the mechanical arms, relentless, of the flour factory. It is here, in the industrial cathedral, where Oliveira dallies, where everyone is an intermediary and everything remains mysterious in its nonsense, and he has a ball looking for the most exciting angles and the sympathies among things. He plays and works at the same time.

Session 6

Ceramiqueros de Traslasierra

Raymundo Gleyzer

Argentina, 1965, 19 min, Spanish

L’industria dell’argilla in Sicilia

Pietro Marelli

Italy, 1910, 5 min, silent

Zum Vergleich

Harun Farocki

Austria and Germany, 2009, 61 min, no dialogue

Clay is well deserving of the noun “creator”. Our species, for example, dug it up and turned it into a house and beautiful objects for the house. Alcira López, potter, took up the trade because she was poor and without even a surface on which to cook. No one taught her, she has taught her fifteen children. She kneads the clay, in the motions of a baker, and turns it, without a wheel, without moulds, adding sausages; we see her thinking with her hands, which is “the true condition of man”, said a man. She moulds turtles and she has never seen one; she sells her demiurge art to tourists. The rivers of the Traslasierra valley afford her with the clay (to turn) and the stones (to polish), the cow and horse dung with heat and colour. The filmmaker affords her with a posterity that she did not solicit and for which we are grateful. In the valley, there are people who work with moulds now.

If we are to support a “technological advance”, may it be the potter’s wheel. It allows you to think with your hands and also your feet, and some pleasure can be derived from the slippery contact of the clay. In Cefalù, in 1910, the potter’s wheel is in the middle of a production chain that, shot by shot, grows calmer: from the roughness of extraction (it seems like they are in a mine) to the fineness of the decoration (in the sun, by the sea and smoking in a pipe; it seems like they are on holidays, that the day belongs to them). Marelli, for his part, frames his shots with pioneering astonishment and audacity. And after the beautiful objects, the house itself with In Comparison, a centrifugal force, an invitation to practice dialects in amazement. Farocki traces the production of the brick through towns and cities in Burkina Faso, India, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland. Outside Europe, the path is long and it is known where the clay comes from (the ground below) and where it goes. In Europe, it is reduced to brick manufacturing, always indoors. Once again, a mingaco, minka, andecha or facendera (Quechuan and Asturian words for the same tradition of communal work), hands instead of electricity, shared happiness, the very discreet charm of the machines, noise instead of songs, trucks, trucks and devoured territory, the women who plaster, the women who transport, the ones who carry the children on their backs, a dome of bricks inside which more bricks are being fired, plastic sacks and prefabricated walls, a Homer Simpson at the control panel, worlds undivided, worlds divided: that all this coexists, that such different modes of production, even opposites, are contemporaneous, undoes the spell of progress and shows that nothing is inexorable, that it is possible to stop deliberately, to want a certain life and not another one.

Three adventures by Pascale Bodet

... he talked a lot, but he didn’t like people talking to him.

Pascale Bodet makes films. Sometimes they’re documentaries. Sometimes they’re fiction. The documentaries are often portraits. The fictions are, in a way, comedies with a distinctive, brusque appeal. All her films have a family air to them and, like the members of all families, they’re different. It isn’t a matter of repeating herself or of having a particular style, but of making films that are a new adventure every time. You have to go out and look for adventure, and what you look for may in the end prove to be something you can’t really achieve: to put yourself for a moment, however, briefly, in another person’s place. Last year, in the Official Section of Punto de Vista, we were able to see one of her adventures, Balehbaleh. Baleh-baleh was various things; among them, it was a story about just this, about putting yourself in another person’s place, about being something else (merchant, king, sun, cloud, stone, stonecutter) only to finally end up being yourself. This time we’ll see another three adventures by Pascale Bodet: Le carré de la fortune, Porte sans clé and Presque un siècle. They are films that seem to progress in an open way but which always have a secret, a different story that goes on under the surface. For a film to have a secret is proof that something living happened when it was filmed, that the film took a bigger risk than was intended, and is also a kind of generosity: the film trusts us, the viewers. It trusts in our intelligence, in our desire to venture out and perhaps get it wrong, to see a sun where really there was a cloud or, in the

end, a stone. Le carré de la fortune [The Square of Fortune], a portrait of an ageing film critic, Michel Delahaye, becomes the tale of a mystery without a solution. Presque un siècle [Nearly a century], a portrait of the film-maker’s grandfather becomes the portrait of a friendship and an unsettling comedy about death. Porte sans clef [Door Without a Key], a fiction bordering on the absurd, conceals a realist film about the anxiety of having or not having a roof over one’s head. And all of them are, among other things, films about stubbornness and the art of not listening, as if people reveal something more important when we refuse to talk than when we talk freely. Until you come up against this stubbornness you can’t actually be in the other person’s place. Until you stop feeling that this - putting yourself in another person’s place - can’t be done, you haven’t met them. Pascale Bodet’s films venture further, to a point where the ground and reality become unstable and changing. Comedy and reality, gravity and fun, meet at once amid the unstable. And instability is also the setting for one of the secret threads woven between these three adventures by director Pascale Bodet, a kind of meeting of different generations, an ability to be together without entirely listening, as if the film-maker were at times the cabin boy accompanying the old pirate, someone who has already had all their adventures and, in a changing world, is not about to change anymore.

Curated and notes by Pablo García Canga

Session 1

Le carré de la fortune

Pascale Bodet, Emmanuel Levaufre

France, 2007, 160 min, colour, French

“Renoir was known for his digressions, for his parentheses within parentheses. (...) And from tangent to tangent, from digression to digression, he ended up talking in the digressions about the main topic that he had left for later...”. The person who says this is an ageing film critic, Michael, Delahaye, and this film is his portrait, made by two young film buffs, Pascale Bodet and Emmanuel Levaufre, who set out to interview him, to have a dialogue with him, but come up against a man who prefers to give monologues, enter into digressions and evade questions but who, at the same time, is answering them, giving them the chance to turn this film buff documentary into something else: a film about a life and its secrets, a mystery novel with no final answer, the portrait of a man who has improvised his life but who, while improvising, drifting at random, perhaps remained true to himself.

Session 2

Porte sans clef Pascale Bodet

France, 2019, 52 min, colour, French

Porte sans clef is an odd comedy. A woman, the film-maker, puts up several friends in her home. But she doesn’t give them the key. To go out all they have to do is leave and close the door, but to get in there must be someone at home. The house is, to a certain extent, a refuge. In this refuge, and in the nearby streets, small incidents occur, unsettling details, a theft, the typical legal swindling of a telephone company, a declaration of love, a little sewing and lots more. All these encounters create a kind of brusque slapstick. Though doesn’t slapstick involve a series of blows? Here, of course, there are blows too. Also, all the actresses and actors, including the filmmaker herself, have a highly distinctive physical grace. You simply have to see them talking to one another, not understanding one another, doing exercise, serving coffee, eating and hitting each other. All of them are seen and directed for what they are: distinct people but at the same time all human, needing certain things, needing for example a place to be, a refuge, a roof.

Session 3

Presque un siècle Pascale Bodet

France, 2019, 52 min, colour, French

The film-maker portrays her grandmother, nearly a hundred years old. This is something that has gradually become almost a genre in itself, like the western or the musical: film-makers who portray their grandparents. Like in westerns, like in musicals, you have to go beyond the genre to understand what the story they are really telling us actually is. Here, for example, there is almost no past. The director’s grandmother doesn’t explain anything about her past life. What we see is the present of a woman nearly a hundred years old. A present made up of little movement, of cooking a little, watching television, talking to her granddaughter without wanting to listen to her, looking through the window and being visited by a friend. And this friend... Oh, it’s better to say no more: you have to see the films; that’s enough talking about them.

Freedom, is it possible? The films of Ana Poliak

«Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea». This is how Henry James begins The Portrait of a Lady. These circumstances can be various: plenty of spare time (i.e. money), a cool enough summer with soft light when night takes hours to fall, the peace of a garden and good company. The circumstances are the setting for the experience, a composition containing all that existed before in detachment from any depth. Does what is agreeable, what is beautiful, what is free depend on them? And if it were not summer, if night fell quickly, if time were short, if it were not warm but chilly, if there weren’t a house and a garden, if one lacked company, and tea, without a cent, would this time, this afternoon, have the right to be agreeable?

Ana Poliak (b. Buenos Aires, 1962) made three featurelength films against the circumstances. Belonging to a generation that came of age under the dictatorship, her early adult life went by amid financial and political crises, endless instability, at a time when historical memory was not institutionally guarantees as it is now in Argentina. The decades in which Poliak made her first three feature films -I say first because she still has many afternoon hours left- were years of total economic collapse, the direct legacy of the economic policy of the dictatorship, which dismantled everything public. Women directors could be counted on the fingers of one hand: Vlastah Lah had made

some films in the sixties, Eva Landeck in the seventies, María Luisa Bemberg in the eighties, and Lita Stantic moved between producing and directing over all these decades. In neighbouring countries things weren’t much better: Marilú Mallet, Carmen Castillo and others had been in exile for some time.

Poliak studied at CERC (today ENERC, the national school of film-making and experimentation) and her first job was as a director’s assistant. She worked with Jeanine Meerapfel, Alberto Fischerman, Fernando Solanas and Eduardo de Gregorio on Cuerpos perdidos. Out of all these, perhaps the most similar to Poliak in that ability to make magic (illusions) in a simple space with only a few people, with whom the films do not create portraits but collaborate. Though she began to make films after the eighties generation, Poliak did not officially belong to New Argentine Cinema, nor did she benefit greatly from the big change brought about in production by the new film act of 1994. It could only be related, perhaps, to the odd gesture towards the street in Labios de churrasco by Raúl Perrone, or to Rapado by Martín Rejtman, the central character of which could be a kind of Buenos Aires cousin of the guy in Parapalos.

Poliak did not even belong to her own style: her films are very different from one another. Especially in their form, something that depends a lot on the circumstances and that in turn creates its own circumstances for the future of film-makers. ¡Que vivan los crotos! (1995) is a film that exists in the place where fiction and documentary meet: bodies and spaces. The second, La fe del volcán, goes into the street, with all its rhythms and noise, to seek the

threads to directly tie anguish into the story. Her last feature film to date, Parapalos, weaves its web somewhere between the first two, constructing new, invented, performed stories, with tales of real lives and working conditions that are also real, bad and unusual.

However, there are some feelings they share. The first is that feeling is not distant from ideas. Conversations about lives, about the sensitive experience of travelling the world, are not separate from the conscious relationship with the time in which it falls to one to live. The second is that these conversations are central to the story, which is made up first of oral memory and second of other things. The third is that freedom is a state of grace, one that is collective and one that has to be reached out for. Apart from control over circumstances or not, life is more than that: it’s everything, every day. Her films manage, against all the circumstances, to find a way of feeling the joy of living consciously against things.

As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lots gray Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses For the people hear us singing: bread and roses, bread and roses! JaMes oppenheiMer, 1911

Curated and notes by Lucía Salas

Mothers and children, interviewers and interviewees. In Suco de sábado it’s the weekend in the city of Buenos Aires. A blessed house is one in which everybody wants to have a good time and there’s no lack of friends to look after the little ones. A mother and a son go out, each to spend the night how they want: she goes dancing with a man, while he goes to steal porn magazines with his friends. An intimacy is created above all from the moments they spend apart, until it’s time for bed again to close it up for another day. In ¡Que vivan los crotos! intimacy is documented in the form of words instead. Bepo Ghezzi was a linyera, a nomadic man who travelled the country like hundreds of others on the national railways, when part of the working class was anarchist, before peronism. Also before lorries, the recent dictatorships and the total industrialisation of the world of work. Grown up, Ghezzi is in his hometown. There too are his lifelong friends and other men he has come across along the way. Sometimes interviewed, sometimes performing, altogether they recreate a part in which they lived history and were anonymous men who went through the fields filling their bags. Intimacy is also shown in set-piece scenes, in a willing performance, in small allusions to being engaged in making a film together and so preserving not only the memory of a shared way of life, but also the language that went with it: the linye argot, with their bagayera (the bag they carried on their shoulders), against their Juan Figura (the police), having a tártago (mate), cooking in a bandolión (a large tin pot).

Suco de sábado

Ana Poliak

Argentina, 1987, 8 min, colour, Spanish

¡Que vivan los crotos!

Ana Poliak

Argentina, 1990, 75 min, colour, Spanish

Session 2

“This door opened up for your past, this piano trembled with your song. This table, this mirror and these paintings hold the echoes of the echo of your voice”, wrote our Homer, Homero Manzi. El eco stylises something that nobody could think of as beautiful: the space beneath a new motorway, a place in the shadow that didn’t exist before, a place where there probably used to be houses and a track. La fe del volcán makes two friends in another place they aren’t usually to be found, and gives them the streets for something more than hunger, cold, looking for money, for something, whatever it is. Each film stars a young girl. The first is small and lives in a dreamlike world, but closer to a nightmare than a dream. She lives with a woman beneath a bridge, surrounded by hunger and danger. The second is older, a teenager, and is a little the ghost of the first: we don’t know where she lives, or who with, she just appears. She works as an apprentice in a hairdresser’s and spends her time in the city centre, an expanded centre that includes those squares outside the big railway stations that in those years, those of the 2001 crisis, turned into a purgatory on the point of falling into the abyss. She makes friends with a knife sharpener much older than her, and who we don’t know much about either, but gradually, in the time they spend amiably riding around on the knife-sharpening bicycle, we find out a little more. He’s lived longer and seen more; in fact, he’s seen one of the causes of the state of things in general. He’s seen the dictatorship, its politics, its economics, and everything returns to it all the time, like an echo. He knows for sure that not only do they walk among corpses, but the ground is full of them. Both of them feel an anguish that seems endless, and this is the anguish that comes from history, because that crisis, that upheaval in the street, comes from before, from the same place as the corpses.

El eco Ana Poliak

Argentina, 1984, 3 min, colour, Spanish

La fe del volcán

Ana Poliak

Argentina, 2000, 85 min, colour, Spanish

Session 3

They go together, the first film and the last. Caracol is a silent short filmed in 16 mm with a Bolex, lasting less than two minutes in its little universe. The story is close to what comes after: a boy climbs a wall to look more closely at a snail moving slowly along the top, and finds an alien world. Between white sheets and linen drying in the sun, there are two young girls playing with a bag that floats above them as if by magic. Something like this happens to the protagonist of Parapalos, but in a harder way, because he isn’t a child anymore and the world he discovers is that of working in the city. A young man from Germania (an old community of German migrants on the Argentine coast, where there are a lot of fields) comes to Buenos Aires to live and work. He moves in with a cousin, a girl who is also from the country, who rents a tiny apartment with one small bed. As often happened to workers in the past (though it has not disappeared completely), they live with a system of “hot-bedding”: when she wakes up, he other comes home from work, making a space as if it were a Soviet romantic comedy, a film by Abram Room, making the most of time, space and happiness. His job is also something that almost doesn’t exist either: he’s a pin boy (parapalos in Spanish) at a bowling alley that’s half real, half digital. Night after night he and some workmates sit, lie and crouch on the invisible side of the game, behind a wooden partition —a space even smaller than his home— picking up pins and returning balls. They’re all men and older than him, and they’ve all lived a long life full of ideas, which they pass on to the lad. A film that takes place almost entirely in interiors, in precarious working and living conditions, which squeezes out of all this the joy of living between things.

Caracol

Ana Poliak

Argentina, 1982, 2 min, B&W, silent

Parapalos

Ana Poliak

Argentina, 2004, 90 min, colour, Spanish

Tales from the land. A Grasscutter’s Tale , a film by Fukuda Katsuhiko (1985)

This special session is an introduction to the work of Fukuda Katsuhiko (1943-1998). After graduating from the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences at Waseda University, Fukuda joined Ogawa Productions during the filming of The Japanese Liberation Front: Summer in Sanrizuka (1968). Ogawa Productions was a filmmaking collective that came together around 1968 and worked as a group for over 30 years, documenting the struggles of the revolutionary student movement as well as the political and territorial struggles and life of rural communities. Fukuda participated in the extraordinary series of seven films the collective made between 1968 and 1978, dedicated to the resistance struggle of peasants and their allies against the construction of Narita International Airport in rural Sanrizuka and violent repression by the state authorities. This included films such as Sanrizuka. The Peasants of the Second Fortress (1970) and Sanrizuka. Heta Village (1973). The filmmakers immersed themselves in the reality they filmed, they participated in the resistance movement, settling in the village of Heta where they lived for years as members of the rural community, whose experiences and trials they recorded with enormous dedication and sensitivity. His first film as a director was a remarkable portrait of the collective at work called Filmmaking and the Way to the Village (1973). He also edited The Story of Magino Village. Raising Silkworms (1977), shot in 8 mm, made when the group moved to

In its second edition in 2006 Punto de Vista dedicated its main retrospective and its publication to the history of Japanese documentary cinema: El cine de los mil años. The aim this year is to continue that dialogue and contribute to greater European dissemination of the non-fiction cinema made in eastern Asia.

Yamagata Prefecture in northern Japan, where they continued to live together and make films. Fukuda left the group the same year and remained in Sanrizuka, where he continued to work on a series of 8 mm “film notebooks”, chronicling the ongoing struggle against the airport and village life. This includes films such as Sanrizuka Has Its Own Agriculture. The Wind Blows from the Tree Roots (1979), The Sky is Under a Violent Attack (1979) and The March of the Soil (1981). In 1985 he made The Grasscutter’s Tale, an intimate portrait of the life of an old peasant woman who continued to resist in Sanrizuka. The film was made in collaboration with his partner, Hatano Yukie, who produced it, helped shooting and editing the film and did the drawings we see in the film. This work signaled an important shift in documentary practice in Japan, including in its relationship to politics, with a focus on the small gestures and greater emphasis on the personal stories of people. It was an influential film for a number of filmmakers who followed in Fukuda’s footsteps and practice. He published books about Sanrizuka, its people and history, as well as a book about the traditional production of saké.

The film will be accompanied by an illustrated presentation by Ricardo Matos, showing extracts from other works by Fukuda, information about his itinerary and images from films influenced by his practice.

A Grasscutter’s Tale | 草とり草紙

Fukuda Katsuhiko

Japan, 1985, 88 min, 8 mm in 16 mm, colour, Japanese

Grandmother Someya was born in Meiji 32 [1899]. She was one of the people who farmed the land set aside for the construction of Narita Airport, as shown in Ogawa Shinsuke’s Sanrizuka series (1968-1978). She opposed the planned second phase of the airport and separated from her family and lived alone. The film consists of nineteen stories told in Grandma Someya’s own words: the story of her sons who died; of her husband who was a barber; of a strange dream; of the time she first came to Sanrizuka to plant new fields; of how she once ate only matches as a child, and so on. As the camera follows Granny Someya as she goes about her farm work, these personal memories, dreams and realities take the form of a series of laments or exemplary stories. In contrast to the violent Sanrizuka series, this is a modest and beautiful film: an extension of Ogawa’s style in The Story of Magino Village. Raising Silkworms (1977), and a fascinating illustration of the beginning of a shift in the subject matter of Japanese documentary away from society and community and towards the personal.

Yasui Toshio, adapted from the 1997 catalogue of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival

The Grasscutter’s Tale, the journey of discovery of a “story”

28 January 2023

Forty years ago, one day in November 1982 Katsuhiko visited Mrs Katsu Someya to ask her if he could film her. It was a long-standing idea, and he needed to pluck up courage to ask her. Mrs Katsu, however, agreed with a simple “Ah, OK”.

Katsuhiko visited Mrs Katsu’s home and vegetable garden near Toho, in the municipality of Narita, and he also visited the factory in Rakkyo where she worked.

Mrs Katsu rambles on about her life, her surroundings and even the animals in the area. One day Katsuhiko, who was listening to her stories attentively, realised something: that her story repeated itself, and did so with an almost musical cadence.

Katsuhiko thought that the repetition was the key to the “Story of Mrs Katsu”. One day he told himself: “I’ll keep the old lady’s stories, and I’ll somehow make my own”.

At the time I had another job, so I accompanied Katsuhiko during the weekends, with a camera on my shoulder. I also participated in the editing, and we decided on almost the whole structure together. One weekend, however, on returning home he said: “Look at this”. I found a fragment that was repeated three times, a scene in which Mrs Katsu spoke about the same thing.

The production of The Grasscutter’s Tale was completed in 8 mm. We only had one negative, and once it was cut there were marks, no matter how much we tried to repair it, so the editing had to be done with great care. The audio took a long time too, in comparison with the 16 mm version, and the splices also caused added noise.

When the 8 mm version was first screened Katsuhiko projected it as he walked, with the projector on his shoulder. It was then enlarged to 16 mm to keep it in better condition. We obtained the positive of this first enlargement, but on screening it for the first time we were told that the people of Kansai did not understand Mrs Katsu due to the heavy accent of the region of Chiba and the speed at which she spoke. The alternative was another development, this time of the negative, and subtitling Mrs. Katsu’s first sentences at the start of the film:

Is there a strong rustling sound? I love that. When the roots are cut. When I listen to the rustling I feel that I am eliminating the parasites from the roots. It is such a nice feeling that they give me…

The trick lies in that the subtitles disappear as the spectators get used to watching the film.

hatano Yukie

This letter has been expressly written for our catalogue by Hatano Yukie, collaborator and partner of the filmmaker.

Paisaia Session 1

We could say this is a session about traces. On the one hand, in 10 watts bakarrik, by Oier Fuentes, we find the imprint of a pirate radio station in Basque in Arantza, Navarra. The broadcaster was on the air until the 1960s, and was set up by the man who tells its story in the voiceover. It seems that, out of fifteen stations that were on the air, only his lasted so long and it seems that the local people were very pleased with everything that came from these microphones, according to a bertso singer who we hear in an old recording. On the other hand, Infernuan, by Iñigo Jiménez, takes us through the traces of the Infierno (“Hell”) neighbourhood of Donostia. A place that is home to the old Plásticas Oramil factory, which at one time produced armaments and is now home to several immigrants who prefer this roof to the street or returning to their own country. In this case, our narrator is Rachid, an inhabitant of the derelict factory. Inviting us into the building, he tells us -among other thingshow two guys tried to erase their fingerprints with corrosive liquid to avoid being identified and deported. It seems paradoxical for a film that invites us to follow traces to show us a reality in which people try to wipe out their own fingerprints. But at the same time, it makes total sense, because in a way, at this session both Fuentes and Jiménez try to make the invisible visible. Both pieces tell us stories of the past, connecting them to the present with archive shots, recordings and sounds, reminding us that repression is always around us. Lur Olaizola

10 watts bakarrik

Oier Fuentes

Spain, 2022, 19 min, digital, colour, Basque

Scriptwriter and editor Oier Fuentes / Sound Xabier Erkizia

Infernuan Iñigo Jimenez Bohoyo

Spain, 2022, 13 min, digital, colour, Spanish

Sound Xavier Erkizia & Luca Rullo / Editing Pello Gutierrez (Zazpi t´erdi) / Animation Unai Ruiz / Credits Fran Fraca & Ignacio Bilbao / Photo retouching Miguel Costa

Paisaia Session 2

There are certain images and concepts that resonate between Y arquitectura un sueño de palmera, by Patxi Burillo, and Noizko basoa, by Mikele Landa. To start with, an image: hands over the ground. In Burillo’s piece the hands, four of them, trace the floor plan of a building, as if they were imagining it by touch. In Landa’s film, the hands, several of them, plant trees. With hoes and boots on. Moving the earth. As if they too were imagining a forest that they don’t know whether they’ll ever see. Moving on to the concepts: space, time and transformation. In Burillo’s film, a country chapel that over time is turned into a spa, then a museum and finally becomes a chapel again. In Landa’s, a forest that stopped being a forest, but will probably become one again. They are changing landscapes with time and people passing over them. People we listen to off screen, as if in the background. As if they didn’t want to draw attention away from the place, the landscape. But at the same time they talk about things as important as the names of trees and the names of people: lizar (ash), urki (birch), haritz (oak), pago (beech), elorri (hawthorn), astigar (maple), gaztainondo (chestnut), gorosti (holly), Ekhi, Paul, Maddi, Amets, Izar, Libe, Lizar, Adei. In fact, there is a little girl who says to us, “Entzun, entzun” (Listen, listen). There’s also a dialogue in the very texture of the pieces: both filmed in 16 mm, with that power of film to capture time itself. Lur Olaizola

Y arquitectura un sueño de palmera

Patxi Burillo

Spain, 2023, 14 min, 16 mm to digital, colour, Spanish

Producer Sara Hernández Askasibar, Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola / Director of photography Pablo Paloma / Camera assistant Jorge Castrillo / Live sound Óscar Vincentelli / Sound design Jorge Bergia, Pablo Rivas / Art director Javier Sáez / Fixed photography Andrea Iañez / Editor Jaume Claret Muxart / Colour Clara Rus

Noizko basoa

Mikele Landa

Spain, 2022, 23 min, 16 mm to digital, colour, Basque

Directors of photography Ernesto Martinez Bucio, Mikele Landa Eiguren / Editor Mikele Landa Eiguren / Sound Aizpea de Atxa Cancel, Malen Nicholson Gorostiaga, Mikele Landa Eiguren, Ernesto Martinez Bucio, Xanti Salvador / Participants Ea, Natxitua eta Bedaronako Basokideak, Haizeder eskolako haurrak / Voices Aitziber Madariaga, Nere Muniozguren, Unai Laresgoiti, Joxe Mari Landa, Bego Aspiazu, Karmelo Landa, Kepa Legina, Eduardo Mancisidor, Mariasun Totorikaguena

Termitas Session 1

Two films in constant movement rub shoulders in this session. Their comings and goings have to do with what there is and what is taken for granted, which is dissected. El andamio / La Bastida [The Scaffolding] begins with an almost narcotic dream. Is there a spell on the house where everybody sleeps? The camera records a state that is like an abyss, and from there moves towards total darkness, a movement from inside outwards. From an ordinary movement, that of going out of the house, comes the idea that if sleeping means being out of time, darkness means being out of space.

One lives on what the other dissects: Mal siglo haya visits one place –the glacial lakes of Neila, with their characters, the permanent and transitory inhabitants of the park– and different times. It begins in a light, analogue register, with a landscape, but is soon invaded by texts that are like geological strata, two from the oral tradition (one a legend and the other a song), and two from the written tradition (a tourist guide and a book about climbing). Centuries separate the ways of talking recorded here, reread as an interminable, gentle joke about the nature park. Intentionally or otherwise, the texts show how people’s relationship with this place, how it is described, has changed into something different, and what has happened there. They also speak of how it will change in the future, when the world’s climate changes what we see on the surface of this area, Neila, forever.

Lucía Salas

El andamio / La Bastida Javier Calvo de Cabrera

Spain, 2022, 10 min, VHS to DCP, colour, no dialogue

Editor Javier Calvo de Cabrera

Mal siglo haya Luis Lechosa

Spain, 2022, 38 min, 16 mm, colour, Spanish

Director of photography and editor Luis Lechosa / Sound designer Pablo Teijón

Termitas Session 2

When does one decide to make a film? When does one decide, for example, to create a portrait? Of course, you have to want to film a person, but it might take something more, spotting a thread to tease out in the person, an aspect that when explained will reveal the whole person but also something that somehow concerns all of us. Bardauri teases out a thread: work. Bardauri, with a simplicity that is synonymous with precision (just one camera person, one sound person, one director who looks, listens and eats toast), portrays Jesús Osorio, who has worked since childhood, who emigrated to Germany in the seventies, who returned to Spain when he got married, worked down countless mines and later as a local policeman, who never stopped learning and who now, retired and widowed, cannot stop working, coming and going along the paths with a lawnmower. With the passing of time, with life, Jesús has become above all else a tireless worker, throwing himself into tasks that never end. Everything, down to the way he spreads and cuts his toast, reveals the meaning of work.

Bardauri condenses a life into fifty minutes and, at the same time, gives a feeling of just how vast one life is. And in Bardauri there are also ten minutes that condense the story even more. Ten minutes that simply tell the story of a well. In a well, in the reason for it, in how hard it is to do it, fits a life, fits a world.

Pablo García Canga

Spain, 2021, 49 min, DCP, colour, Spanish

Editor José Otero / Script José Otero & Jesús Osorio / Music Jesús Osorio / Sound editor Genzo

Termitas Session 3

Termites can also grow in film schools. Termites that eat away the boundaries of the documentary, that use what they find on the edges of reality to create something new, to tell it another way.

In 2021, Sara Domínguez López, Luis Morla and Alberto Ruiz made No conozco la historia del fuego as their final project for the diploma in documentary film at ECAM. Named after a verse by Alejandra Pizarnik, the film is surprising precisely because it deals with time suspended in a forest and the stay or fleeting passage through it of some young immigrants; with the relations between the young people and between them and the forest.

In 2022 the Dutch director Marieke Elzerman made La voz rosa as a creative project at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola. In it she portrays a young foreign teacher being treated in San Sebastián for her damaged voice. In this process, she goes about the city having revealing encounters with other women who devote their time to her, who show her what they do with their time, helping, sometimes inadvertently, a young teacher to get her voice back.

Miguel Zozaya

No conozco la historia del fuego

Sara Domínguez López, Luis Morla & Alberto Ruiz

Spain, 2022, 26 min, DCP, colour, Spanish

Script Sara Domínguez López, Luis Morla & Alberto Ruiz / Directors of photography Sara Monge & Álvaro de Siria / Sound Ángel Rojas / Editor Miguel Ariza

La voz rosa

Marieke Elzerman

Spain-Netherlands, 2002, 26 min, 16 mm to DCP, Spanish and French

Director of photography Artur Pol Cambrubí / Sound design Zita Leemans / Sound Tomás Florez and Isabella Salvo / Music Nikolaï Clavier / International Film Festival Rotterdam

Professional activities

Once again Punto de Vista proposes a space where producers, creators, associations and festivals have a place for exchange and conversation about documentary film. This path began in 2018 with NaparDocs by the hand of NAPAR, association of audiovisual production companies of Navarra; an open meeting that has been growing and gaining ground in the festival, intertwining and creating environments of exchange with the invited people, and at the same time, extending beyond the Navarre territory. A space for linkage and debate with three working tables on screenwriting, directing, film production and distribution, which is completed with networking sessions to promote co-productions and create cross-border bridges within the Euroregion environment, in collaboration with the Institut français. 2023 also marks the beginning of the collaboration with Doklab, the new immersive documentary residency created by Arena Comunicación in 2022. Punto de Vista, in collaboration with Fundación Caja Navarra, will host the presentation sessions of the selected projects, which will be exhibited before a professional jury at Civican.

Finally, as a member of the festival associations since its creation in 2020, Federación Pantalla and the coordinator La Mesta will have working meetings to foster mutual connections and the improvement and reflection on festival production processes.

Echoes and Ecologies. A poetic and political approach to the Guillermo Zúñiga archive

Catarina Boieiro (b. Lisbon, 1991) is an independent curator, producer and researcher. Her work focuses on the documentary image and contemporary creativity off the dominant film circuits. She recently co-curated the exhibition «Résistance Visuelle Généralisée. Livres de photographie et mouvements de libération en Angola, Mozambique, GuinéeBissau, Cap-Vert» (Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris and Galerias Municipais de Lisboa, with Raquel Schefer. She was the editorial coordinator of Doc’s Kingdom. Seminário internacional de cinema documental [International Documentary Film Seminar] in 2021, and worked with Stenar Projects, a production and distribution platform for artists’ films, between 2020 and 2022.

Candela Sotos (b. Madrid, 1986). Holder of a master’s degree in photography and contemporary art from the Université Paris VIII, she was part of the Artists’ Programme at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires. Her work explores forms of official historical discourses and memory through different media: botanical practice, archives and moving pictures. She has received creative grants from the Madrid autonomous region, the Argentine national arts fund and the Matadero artistic residency centre, and has presented her work at MUAC-UNAM, the Mexican art, design and science laboratory, Medialab Prado, Sala de Arte Joven, Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti and the Carlos Thays botanical garden in Buenos Aires. She is currently in the process of editing her first film, Yrupé, and co-directs Lacalor, a graphic art studio in Madrid.

Guillermo Zúñiga (1909-2005) was a biologist, photographer and pioneer of scientific film in Spain. A defender of film as a tool for science and education, he was linked to republican educational institutions like the Pedagogical Missions and the School Institute. During the Spanish Civil War, he produced extensive photographic documentation and helped to film republican newsreels. His position close to the Communist Party led him into exile in France and then, in 1949, to Argentina, where he was to work in the San Miguel film studios, as well as on different documentary projects that linked science to indigenous culture. In 1959 he returned to Spain, where he was to work as head of production at UNINCI and in 1969 founded ASECIC, the Spanish association of scientific film and image. He strove throughout his life to defend and promote scientific film. Despite the historical importance of his work and his archive, up to now these have been little known or appreciated.

An unfinished film about the Yrupé flower, an Amazonian water lily, made during his exile in Buenos Aires, is the starting point for a poetic and political approach to the Zúñiga archive; it includes extracts from films, photographs, letters and other fragments of a collection that runs through 20th-century history, but also hard-to-find images, lost films, uncertainties and controversies; before finally perhaps today continuing his efforts in the areas of transmission, documentation and recreation, political commitment and care. The aim of the residency at the Centro Huarte since 2018 has been in-depth research in order to make a documentary film, as well as seeking new creative ways of sharing the process of work, offering an open reflection on the status of documentary images in the relations between art and science, memory and forgetting, nature and politics.

Program produced in collaboration with Centro Huarte

Super 8 Against the Grain

The Super 8 format was first marketed in 1965. Its peak, between the early seventies and the mid-eighties, coincided with a global cycle of revolutions, defeats and transformations of the left, marked by the violent appearance of neoliberal policies at global level. In this context, Super 8 played a fascinatingly ambiguous role in terms of film-making practices. It played a decisive part in redefining the parameters of the political cinema that emerged from the cycle of 68, but also generated new, closer links between cultural practices, the fossil economy and the imaginative energies of expanding capitalism.

On this basis, and concentrating on a materialist approach, we have prepared a programme of six films that fundamentally explore two internal tensions in the medium. Both of them emerge from problems of scale, i.e. from the axis that runs from the small to the big: on the one hand, local issues —and local ways of dealing with them with simple film technology— and on the other global economic, political and media logics —and ways of confronting them from alternative viewpoints—.

Thus, the films we present show some of the multiple facets that made Super 8 more than just a format. Whether as the protagonist of artistic experimentation seen as intervention in the public space, as a tool for a post-modern portrayal of conflicts between labour and capital, as the key to activating collective forms of organisation or as a means of expressing the different formulas for third-world internationalism, Super 8 is presented here as a key political tool in convulsive times.

This session has been suppported by PUBLICOS from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (PID2019-105800GB-I00), in collaboration with Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola and the Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico, and the work of Milena Fiore, Laura Ibáñez and Monica Maurer.

Alberto Berzosa is a European doctor of History and Theory of Art, head of the publisher Brumaria and author of books like Cine y sexopolítica (2020) and Cámara en mano contra el franquismo (2009). He works as a member of the Estética Fósil project (CSIC) and on the management committee of Cost Action TRACTS. He recently co-published, together with Miguel Errazu the monographic issue of Secuencias. Revista de historia del cine no. 55, 2022, on “Súper 8 contra el grano” [Super 8 Against the Grain].

Miguel Errazu is a European doctor of Audiovisual Communication. His work deals with the cultural history of 20th-century alternative cinema in Mexico and Latin America. He is currently the María Zambrano postdoctoral researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and member of the Devisiones research group. He is the joint author, together with Alberto Berzosa, of the above-mentioned monograph that gives its name to this Lan programme.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Chuck Kleinhans

USA, 1979, 2 min, Super 8 to video, colour, English

Riotinto, una modesta experiencia de reforma educativa

Tomás Alberdi

Spain, 1973, 19 min, Super 8, colour, Spanish

Pira

Sérgio Péo

Brazil, 1972, 14 min, Super 8, colour, Portuguese

Cile, 1972

Monica Maurer

Italy/Chile, 1972, 24 min, Super 8, colour, Italian, Spanish and German

Les espagnols ont ils conquis les Andes?

Audiopradif

France, 1978, 27 min, Super 8 to video, colour, French & Spanish

Rank and File

Sylvia Harvey

USA, c. 1973, 6 min, Super 8, colour, English

Kosmogonía. Film performance para un planetario

Kosmogonía. Film performance para un planetario is the work of visual artist Deneb Martos and sound improviser Wade Matthews, who have already worked together on pieces like Gold Film and Skin Film (the latter in collaboration with dancer Cecilia Gala). The work process sets out from the direct use of materials of all kinds, somewhat unusual and chosen for their shapes, for their organic properties or for their symbolic meaning, on the orthochromatic film, which reacts in a partly uncontrolled way. Starting out from this slightly random premise opens up a genuinely experimental path, which at this point calls for enormous technical precision and maximum attention from the artists. The conditions of the screening and the live improvisation are as fundamental to the work as the way it is prepared. At its base is a rigorous theoretical foundation, which commits fully to execution in time to become invisible and allow the viewer to sink into a state bordering on a trance. In this way cameraless film-making and sound improvisation are used to revive atavistic memories.

The film, to be projected onto the dome of the planetarium (Tornamira room), takes as its starting point the cosmos. The elements chosen for the film print and the acoustic part might be considered waste, very modest compared to the wonders of the galaxy, but these organic remains and fragments of sound, collected and processed by Deneb Martos and Wade Matthews, end up revealing how the whole can be sensed in a minuscule part, and illuminating -like an ephemeral torch- the constant course of contraction and expansion.

In this case, the piece is supported with texts by Bárbara Mingo Costales, author of the essay Vilnis, devoted to Lithuanian composer and painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, a synesthetic artist in whose work the cosmos plays a primordial part.

We feel the desire to come closer to what is distant, and what seems the most distant is in fact our home. We think of a gap and without realising we are describing a dome. What we grasp as distance is shown to be surface. We are knocking at the door from the very centre of the galaxy. Here goes with an attempt to rope in everything that gravitates and revolves, using an incantation that goes, “Shine, shine, shine and tinkle”. And the galaxy answers and everything shines and tinkles.

Length 30 minutes

35 mm projection

Digital synthesis and manipulation of field recordings in real time

Deneb Martos. Visual artist specialising in cameraless film and photochemical techniques. In her work she uses analogue projection devices, exposing the physical phenomenon of the image and turning it into the record of an emanation of lights and shadows whose direct dialogue with the materials printed on the celluloid highlight their haptic qualities denoting atavistic prints and traces.

Wade Matthews. Sound artist. Digital synthesis, amplified objects and processed field recordings.

Object Lessons: Rossellini, Godard-Miéville

Many of the debates around documentary filmmaking can be framed in a wider context: the debate on the didactic genres of imagination. It has taken place over a long time in the history of literature and art and clearly affects cinema: in the form of biography, portrait, confession, memories, treatise, essay, as wells as the hermetic genres, have nourished the cinema from its origins to this day.

Radical didactic projects were carried out from the mid-60s until the late 1970s by Roberto Rossellini and Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. Each one, in their own way, represented a break with filmmaking practice as it had been carried out until then, exploring a still-young medium: television. Rossellini’s “visual encyclopaedia” project, brought to an end by his premature death, was inspired by ideas of the Moravian pedagogue Iohannes Amos Comenius (1592-1670) such as “direct vision”. For their part, Godard and Miéville set up their own production company -Sonimage- in the early 1970s. The second channel of French TV commissioned them to make long series: Six fois deux / Sur et sous la communication (1976) and France / tour / détour / deux / enfants (1978).

We will allocate two sessions to this issue. First, we will screen three episodes of the work for TV by Rossellini and Godard-Miéville, followed by a round table with José Antonio Escrig, Professor in the Specific Didactics Department of the Faculty of Education at the University of Zaragoza, and José Ángel Alcalde, passeur and Socratic maestro of several generations of cinephiles in the Barcelona area, founder of Xcèntric. There will also be a talk by Paulino Viota, one of the best experts on the work of Godard, who has just published a book titled Jean-Luc Godard. 60 años insumiso (Athenaica, 2022).

Atti degli apostoli [chapter 2]

Roberto Rossellini

Italy-France-Tunisia-Germany-Spain, 1969, 57 min, 35 mm to digital

France / tour / détour / deux / enfants

[chapters 1A & 1B]

Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville

France, 1978, 25 min + 25min, video 1’’ to digital

Godard’s Sensitive Thought

Talk by Paulino Viota

Dear Manuel,

Just after hanging up, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967) came to mind. As it happens —everything happens by chance— I had seen an extract of it yesterday. If it is a case of relating Rossellini and Godard, and if we wish to see Rossellini in his didactic sense and highlight what he worked on in the last fifteen years of his prodigious career, to present us with the thinking that has marked out the path of the human race, when turning to Godard I cannot think of any film where this is manifested in such a direct and even shameless way as Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle.

Godard in person (his voice, which we hear in whispers, as if he were sitting next to us in the cinema and did not want to bother the other spectators) philosophises on the most everyday aspects, such as the foam on a cup of coffee in a bistro or washing a Morris Mini in a carwash tunnel (you know my analysis of that scene).

Godard becomes the philosopher and uses filmmaking, as Eisenstein wished, as an image, as ‘sensitive thinking’ that backs up his philosophies (based on Francis Ponge, a ‘cold’ writer —like our two filmmakers— who combines poetry and essay and takes sides on issues).

Rossellini does not philosophise, but shows us those who do in their daily lives, breeding goats, sowing seeds or making pots in Atti degli apostoli.

During my talk I may show some of these scenes and comment on them a bit. An image has been etched in my mind, that of the Council of Jerusalem in Atti (if my memory serves me right) in which those shepherds, farm workers and artisans discuss —without any pomp— in the most friendly and ordinary way whether Christianity should just be for one ethnic group or for the entire human race. A matter that ends up being essential for everyone’s future takes the form of such a physical and material phenomenon (like the cup of coffee of the Morris Mini) as circumcision.

I would like to compare Rossellini’s wonderful scene with one from another powerful film where an important issue is being discussed —perhaps in the Roman Senate— in The Fall of the Roman Empire or Spartacus. I would highlight Rossellini’s originality.

Could my talk go in that direction? If you agree, this letter could serve as a presentation.

All the best,

paulino

Altzuza Performance by IbonRG in Museo Oteiza

Walls, windows, floors, ceilings, skylights, stairs, handrails, walkways, pedestals and fences resound. The voices that ring against these things spread out in all directions, through space, and fade. But there are echoes that don’t quite fade out, come what may.

The absence of an echo can make us tremble, even feel terror and anxiety; or —why not?— it can calm and pacify us. In the absence of an echo, the voice has to work harder. And the hearing too. A capella singing comes about as it comes up against things, and this is when its appearance is shaped, one feels conditioned and takes decisions.

In the past I’ve mentioned that we are afraid to hear our own voice, and this fear grows when our voice explodes, naked, and fuses with our inner ear, before coming up against nothing else. I could explain the reasons in acoustic terms, but I doubt that our trembling comes from this alone.

... lurra izigarri oro ikharaturik, zuhamuiek dakartela odolezko izerdi tenpestatez, igortziriz, aire oro samurrik mendi eta harri oro elgar zatikaturik mundu oro jarriren da suiak arrasaturik

Gogoaren durunda apaltzen saiatu arren, ozen dirau

Ibon RG. Ever since I was small I’ve played Basque traditional instruments, and in 1999 I started to sing and play the guitar in the group Eten. From 2006 onwards, under the name IbonRG (b. Sestao, 1978), I wrote experimental pieces in my bedroom with all kinds of instruments and objects, and distributed them on CDs full of mp3s. By the time of my first solo live show, the voice had become the only instrument. In 2016 the double album Hil zara came out: some twenty songs recorded in caves, hermitages and bunkers. I have worked on many joint projects, in both improvised and composed music, in productions, music for film and theatre and reports for the radio and print media. The album oMOrruMU baMAt, released together with Enrike Hurtado in 2021, sets out from some words by Joxean Artze and his contribution to the txalaparta.

And maybe it’s just this panic that pushes me to choose. Bunkers, stables, caves, hermitages, garages, enormous water tanks, tunnels, churches. In them I’ve recorded my voice, I’ve altered my songs. Always on the pretext of seeking the truth.

hotsa doilorra, merkea zen

Churches were built to heal fear, to heal the soul and the hearing, with the hope of finding the truth in the heavens. The light that Sáenz de Oiza let into the Oteiza Museum also dresses up everything it finds in its path as a lie, for us, starting out from its truths, to build our own. Fortunately I’ll also lie, improvising and composing, in or out of sight, whispering or shouting, tonally or atonally.

kaperen zimenduak dardararaziko badituzte nire otoitzen orpoek, dantzatu bitez

Closing session

La Montagne infidèle was the missing piece of the work of Jean Epstein. At 26 years of age and at the start of his career, Epstein shot this documentary on the eruption of Mount Etna in June 1923. Shot between Coeur fidèle and La Belle nivernaise, both in the same year and with Paul Guichard as cinematographer, La Montagne infidèle reflects the interest in real locations that would dominate his filmography from the 1930s onwards, and which adopts the form of cataclysm and the extraordinary here. The mythical aura around the film not only comes from its theme and the conditions under which it was shot, but also from the essays written by Epstein. His second book on cinema was titled Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna (1926), and its theoretical reflection seems to emerge from his extreme experience of the volcano. In 2021 the heirs of Pere Tresserra set up a repository in Filmoteca de Catalunya of a collection of Pathé-KOK films, a 28 mm system for an educational and family film circuit. Thanks to the work of 2CR (The Centre of Conservation and Restoration of Filmoteca de Catalunya) this copy of La Montagne infidèle was identified in the collection and work started on its restoration. So, we now can finally show what the filmmaker saw on Mount Etna.

Daniel Pitarch and Rosa Cardona

La Montagne infidèle Jean Epstein

France, 1923, 24 min, 28 mm to DCP, silent with intertitles in Spanish

Screening with live music by IbonRG

X Films

Every year since 2010, Punto de Vista has invited three film-makers to present a documentary essay project to be shot in Navarra. The X Films project takes its name from the Navarrese production company founded by Juan Huarte in 1963, with the idea of producing films of “singular artistic interest”, in which artists like Jorge Oteiza, Néstor Basterretxea, Rafael Ruiz Balerdi and José Antonio Sistiaga, among many other creative talents, took their first steps on film. By returning to that spirit of sponsorship, the festival sets out to offer rising film-makers the chance to create a new piece of work, at the same time bringing new voices on the non-fiction scene to the Navarra region.

This year Daniela Delgado, Ilan Serruya and Anna López Luna have been invited to submit proposals. The jury, made up this year of Gloria Vilches, Ramiro Ledo and Marian Fernández, will select one of the projects to be made during 2023 as a personal essay, lasting at least twenty minutes. The film will be shown at the next edition of Punto de Vista. This year will see the première of the thirteenth winner of X Films, Renacuajos, by Blanca Camell Galí. The audience will also have the chance to see a session featuring some of the previous work by this year’s candidates.

X Films Jury

Gloria Vilches (b. Valencia, 1978). Doctor of Audiovisual Communication, specialising in avant-garde, experimental and art film. Since 2009 she has coordinated Xcèntric, the experimental film programme at the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona (CCCB), and other audiovisual projects at the CCCB. She has also worked as a programmer for festivals and centres like S8 Mostra de Cinema Periférico (A Coruña), Montehermoso (Vitoria-Gasteiz) and Tabakalera (Donostia-San Sebastián). She regularly gives classes on experimental film as a guest lecturer on university masters and postgraduate programmes. Alongside this, she sporadically pursues her creative career in the field of collage and Super 8.

Ramiro Ledo. Founder and director of Atalante, a film distributor set up in 2021 whose catalogue combines contemporary independent and auteur cinema, début films and heritage films. He was the originator, a founding member and president of the NUMAX cooperative from 2014 onwards; until 2021 he headed the screening, distribution and financial planning and management areas. Since 2019 he has also been the manager and programmer at DUPLEX Cinema, through which he led the recovery of the only cinema currently open in Ferrol (A Coruña). He is vice-president of Próxima, the association of distributors of independent and auteur film in the original language and president of Promio, a network of independent cinemas.

Pascal

Graduate in Audiovisual Communication Founder of Txintxua Films and executive producer of all its films, he has produced 8 features, 2 fiction series and 13 shorts. His recent productions include the film A los libros y a las mujeres canto, by María Elorza (2022), the series for Netflix Intimidad (2022), the film 918 GAU by Arantza Santesteban (2021) and the series for ETB Hondar ahoak, by Koldo Almandoz (2020). She is currently the president of IBAIA, the Basque producers’ association, and is a member of the Basque council of culture and of the Gipuzkoa provincial council of culture.

Marian Fernández

(b. Iruña, 1974).

X Films Filmmakers

Daniela Delgado Viteri was born in Portoviejo, Ecuador. She studied at FUC (Argentina), Le Fresnoy (France) and Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (Donostia-San Sebastián). She has written and directed various short films mixing elements of documentary and fiction, including Espectáculos variados para eventos varios (2016), Shortcuts (2019) and Todxs queremos un lugar al que llamar nuestro (2022), among others. Her work has been screened at film festivals including IFFR, CPHDOX, IDFA, True False FF, Valdivia IFF and Mar del Plata.

Selected filmography

Todxs queremos un lugar al que llamar nuestro (2022), Antonio Valencia (2020), Atajos (2018), Language Exercise (2018)

Ilan Serruya is a director and editor. He studied Fine Art, Audiovisual Editing and is a graduate of the LAV master’s programme. He works between non-fiction and formal experimentation. He juxtaposes the presence of the body with the timelessness of the image. He uses language or its omission, silence or landscape to create spaces ready to be inhabited. His first feature-length film, Reunión (2018), took part in festivals like Doclisboa, the Seville European Film Festival and the Periférico film festival, among others. Another facet of his work has focused on the appropriation and resignification of domestic archive material.

Selected filmography Quedará el paisaje (2021), ¿Para qué sirve un zeide? (2018), Reunión (2018), La distancia perdida (2015)

Anna López Luna is a visual artist born in 1983 in Barcelona. She studied at the Ecole nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris Cergy, in France. She lives and works between France and Spain. She was resident artist at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid in 2021-2022. She has exhibited and screened her work at Colección Lambert in Avignon, MABA in Nogent sur Marne, FRAC in Brittany, Octubre Centre de Cultura Contemporánea in Valencia, the Jafre biennial, Tabakalera in San Sebastián, Les Ateliers sauvages in Algeria, Bilbao Arte, Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Mudam in Luxembourg, Centre Civic de San Andreu in Barcelona and La Casa de la Paraula, among other places.

Selected filmography

Sistema de errores (instalación multipantalla, 2020), Peau de memoire (2019), Ramasser les douilles (2019), Which Future?! (2018), Sous le manteau (2018), Enterrar y callar (2014)

Previous Works Screening

Antonio Valencia

Daniela Delgado Viteri, Ecuador-Spain, 2020, 6 min, 16 mm to digital, colour, Spanish

A conversation with Antonio Valencia that ends, as it must, with a cry of “goal”.

Todxs queremos un lugar al que llamar nuestro

Daniela Delgado Viteri, Spain, 2020, 13 min, 16 mm to digital, colour, Spanish

A hairdresser’s shop in Madrid is filled with people who come to see and touch a replica of Our Lady of El Quinche. Then a priest suggests taking it to a church. The story continues when the replica of the statue is returned to the hairdresser’s after an angry mob disagrees with the way the priest handles things. Then I decide to write a letter to the priest and this is where the short film begins.

¿Para qué sirve un zeide?

Ilan Serruya, Argentina, 2018, 16 min, digital, colour, Spanish

Uncle Gustavo’s camera starts to film. The zeide (grandfather in Yiddish) is coming and the family is celebrating. Someone says, “Half of Buenos Aires is burning”. The children sing, then there’s a pillow fight and a letter for the grandfather: What’s a zeide for? The lights go out -it’s time to blow out the candles.

Quedará el paisaje

Ilan Serruya, Spain, 2021, 10 min, digital, colour, Hebrew-Spanish

It’s just an idea / that line / the place I occupy / I’m not you / the territory packed up / this friction. Today they told me there is better for me and I didn’t know how to answer in my language. This is me formulating questions, or rehearsing the territorialisation of identity.

Which Future?!

Anna López Luna, Spain, 2018, 21 min, digital, colour, French-English

Which Future?! is a video about two activists who hung from the bridge in Aubonne with a climbing rope, in Switzerland in 2003 during the G8 meeting in Evian. In 2018, when I was invited to take part in an exhibition in Switzerland, I remembered these events.

Peau de mémoire

Anna López Luna, France, 2019, 9 min, digital, colour, French

Peau de mémoire is a video about a lottery wheel made by Pablito, a carpenter from Aragón who was a refugee in France during the Spanish Civil War.

X Films 2022 Project

Renacuajos Blanca Camell

Spain, 2023, 15 min, HD, colour, Spanish-French-Catalan

Editor Melisa Liebenthal

In the early 2000s, when I was a pre-teen, I travelled with my family to Navarra. Twenty years later I’m looking for the photos of this trip and I can’t find them. Starting out from a family story, Renacuajos (which means little squirts or tadpoles) reflects on the transmission of family memories and how family pictures accumulate. How do I film or photograph my son? What memories am I leaving him with the images I’m constantly creating? How do we relate to family images?

Festival Mediation Program

What do pictures sound like?

A sensory experimentation workshop to explore and play with the relationship between sound and image. Sound is a primordial dimension of the cinema experience, but it often does not receive the attention it deserves.

At this workshop hearing will be sharpened to listen beyond the obvious, and we’ll practise in groups to introduce ourselves to the construction of sound.

Drac Màgic is a social cooperative founded in 1971, devoted to study and education about audiovisual culture. Our mission is to stimulate thought and action around images to help build a society that is responsible, active and creative in visual culture and its role in creating imaginary worlds. Our main initiatives include: Construir Mirades [Constructing Views], an educational project to learn about audiovisual languages; the Mostra Internacional de Films de Dones, an international festival of films directed by women, in Barcelona, and Pack Màgic, a children’s film distributor, among many other activities.

Creatures of nature: plants, humans and other animals

A selection of ten short films for all audiences about the relationship between the different creatures of nature. The session takes us on a journey to explore the multiple ecosystems that our planet offers us and the species that coexist with them. The program embraces an ecological vision that invites us to reflect on the consequences of human actions on the environment.

A program from the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona presented by Gloria Vilches, the session curator

Animal Movie

Grant Munro

Canada, 1966, 9 min

A child discovers that he can’t compete with a monkey, a snake, a horse or a grasshopper when he tries to imitate their movements. But, on the other hand, he also discovers that humans are capable of developing technologies that enable them to move in other ways.

Sea Song

Richard Reeves

Canada, 1999, 4 min

This delicately handcrafted piece, with drawings (and sounds!) painted directly onto the film, shows a fantastic, hectic vision of life in the sea at night.

Paradise Lost

Evelyn Lambart

Canada, 1970, 4 min

This film shows how birds, butterflies and other forest creatures succumb to air pollution caused by humans. A call for the right of animals to live in a pollution-free habitat.

Walk-in-the-Forest

Diane Obomsawin

Canada, 2009, 3 min

A healer is travelling through a forest in search of a medicinal flower. On the journey, he comes across a lake with healing properties but witnesses its deterioration.

Madrugada en Lobeke Aurora

Gasull

Spain, 2022, 3 min

Specifically for this programme, Aurora Gasull has made a sensorial piece of abstract animation inspired by the sound scene recorded by Eloïsa Matheu, a well-known promoter of the sounds of nature, in the tropical forest of Lobeke, in Cameroon.

Bouquet écologique 26 Rose Lowder

France, 2003, 1 min

Images of crops and animals taken on an organic farm in Italy. The author’s particular style of filming, frame by frame, creates a surprising effect of vibration.

A Man and His Dog Out for Air

Robert Breer

USA, 1957, 3 min

This dance of subtle sounds and scribbles narrates the habitual, quiet walk of a man and his dog.

Dog Duet William Wegman

USA, 1975, 2 min

Why are these two dogs moving mysteriously in sync? Video artist William Wegman has often worked with his dog, Man Ray, accompanied in this piece by another canine friend.

Historia Naturae (Suita)

Jan Švankmajer

Czechoslovakia, 1967, 9 min

Using the stop-motion technique, this famous Czech animator portrays a curious fauna. Each of the eight chapters that make up this piece is dedicated to a specific species (fish, birds, reptiles, mammals...), assigning them pieces of music in different styles.

Persona

Gloria Vilches

Spain, 2019, 3 min

Lorena Álvarez’s song, which introduces this video clip filmed in the Atlantic Islands of Galicia National Park, reflects on the randomness of species: why, within this random distribution, did the artist become a person instead of a bear or fig tree?

Cinema on the move. The currency of the Lumière brothers

Today, in a world filled with immediate images and fully urbanized, it might be hard for us to remember that it was only just over a century ago —with the second industrial revolution and the birth of modern cities— that cinema appeared, a new language to understand this new world, and of which we are the heirs.

The Lumière brothers’ operators, dedicated to travelling all over the world with their camera, gradually explored the formal and syntactic possibilities of this new language. And from the world they brought not just pictures, but a point of view, a framing, an angle from which to view life as it passes before the camera. The camera’s eye reflected better than any other the disruptive space and unpredictable movement of the new city. And with it a new reality, which needed to be told in a new language in order to be analysed and explored. In a single film shot of the streets of Paris, taken by the Lumière brothers’ cameramen, we can see the bourgeois walking alongside the worker, the working women coming out of the factory, the beggar and the aristocrat sharing the same urban space, but with this perhaps something rather more radical: the hypothesis that the roles can change in a moment, that at bottom their destinies are highly unstable. For viewers at the time, a shot like this was able to illustrate the new social realities better than any novel on the subject.

Over the last century, from the Paris of the Lumière brothers to the futuristic city of Blade Runner, the grammar of film and the view of the camera evolved in time with the urban space they portrayed, because film, both when acting as a dream machine and when it documents reality, was born to be seen and understood by its inhabitants.

The session “El cine en marcha. La actualidad de los Lumière” [Cinema on the Move. The Currency of the Lumière Brothers] —accompanied by the showing of extracts from their film work— aims to awaken secondary students’ interest in film history, its origins and the evolution of its language. And with this for them to join Punto de Vista, an event that connects the artistic and poetic side of film with its documentary vocation of portraying reality.

Program and texts by Mercedes Álvarez

Jóvenes Programadores Moving Cinema X Punto de Vista

A Bao A Qu is a cultural association founded in 2004, specifically devoted to projects that link creativity and education, involving children and young people, creators (film-makers, photographers, artists and so on) and teachers. Highlights among the programme run by the association include “Cine en curso” [Film in Progress], “Fotografía en curso” [Photography in Progress], “Creadores en residencia en los institutos de Barcelona” [Creators in Residence at Barcelona High Schools] and the European projects Moving Cinema, Inside Cinema and CinEd.

For the second year in a row, Punto de Vista will be running the Jóvenes Programadores Moving Cinema project, a space for programming by young people aged between 16 and 20, who take responsibility for selecting and presenting a programme of short films as part of the festival. Over several days, supported by the A Bao A Qu team, they will be viewing and discussing several short films by film-makers who have been part of X Films. They will make a selection, prepare a programme and present the session together with one or more of the directors during the festival.

Designing a film programme involves watching films carefully, getting to know the film-makers’ work, forging relationships, thinking about how to present them to provide a unique experience for audiences and coming up with ways of presenting and publicising them to encourage more people to discover and appreciate them. By engaging in these processes, the Young Programmers will forge a very special link with the films they see and programme, and can pass this on to other young people.

Jóvenes Programadores Moving Cinema x Punto de Vista is run thanks to the collaboration of the Civivox network, as part of the European Moving Cinema project, led by A Bao A Qu since 2014 and has already been part of other festivals, including Festival de Cine de Sevilla, D’A Film Festival, l’Alternativa, BelDocs (Serbia), Kino Otok (Slovenia) and Vilnius Film Festival (Lithuania), among others.

The full programme of the screening is available at www.puntodevistafestival.com

Sources of the images

p. 11

Monasterio de Loeches. Misha Bies

Golas

pp. 12, 34

Misha Bies Golas

pp. 40-41

Still of Die Donau rauf (Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler, 1992)

p. 43

Still of Pachamama-nuestra tierra (Peter Nestler, 1995)

p. 44

Still of Spanien! (Peter Nestler, Zsóka Nestler and Taisto Jalamo, 1973)

p. 47

Still of Die Nordkalotte (Peter Nestler, 1991)

p. 49

Still of Unrecht und Widerstand (Peter Nestler, 2022)

p. 51

Still of Ödenwaldstetten (Peter Nestler in collaboration with Kurt Ulrich, 1964)

p. 53

Still of Stoff (1), (Peter Nestler, 1974)

p. 55

Young boy from Kovacica among paintings by Martin Jonaš. Photo by Peter Nestler, c. 1964

p. 59

Still of Moana (Robert J. Flaherty and Frances H. Flaherty, 1926)

p. 60

Still of Lu tempu di li pisci spata (Vittorio de Seta, 1954)

p. 62

Still of Det stora äventyret (Arne Sucksdorff, 1953)

p. 64

Still of Jamal (Ibrahim Shaddad, 1984)

p. 66

Still of Trilla (Sergio Bravo, 1959)

p. 68

Still of Zum Vergleich (Harun Farocki, 2009)

p. 70

Misha Bies Golas

p. 82

Ana Poliak and Willi Behnisch shooting ¡Que vivan los crotos! (1990)

p. 83

Storyboard of Caracol, from the archives of Ana Poliak

pp. 84, 88-91

Images of Katsu Someya (Fukuda Katsuhiko)

p. 92

Misha Bies Golas

p. 100

Shooting of La flor de Irupé in Chaco, Argentina, (Guillermo López Fernández Zúñiga, 1954). From the archives of Guillermo López Fernández Zúñiga

p. 106

Misha Bies Golas

p. 107

Filmstrips of Kosmogonía. Image by Deneb Martos

p. 113

Filmstrip of La Montagne infidèle (Jean Epstein, 1923)

p. 114

Misha Bies Golas

p. 121

Still of Renacuajos (Blanca Camell, 2023)

p. 122

Misha Bies Golas

p. 125

Cache Cache (Judit Orosz, 2020)

p. 129

Still of Historia Naturae (Suita) (Jan Švankmajer, 1967)

p. 131

Still of Lumière! L’aventure commence (2016)

Sources of the screening prints

pp. 40-52

Die Donau rauf, Zeit, Chilefilm, Mi país, Spanien!, Von Griechenland, Zigeuner sein, Fos-sur-Mer, Das Warten, Die Nordkalotte, Unrecht und Widerstand, Der offene Blick, Am Siel, Ödenwaldstetten, Die Judengasse and Stoff (1). Prints provided by Deutsche Kinematek

p. 42

Pachamama-nuestra tierra. Print provided by Strandfilm Produktions

p. 52

Die Römerstraße im Aostatal. Print provided by SWR (Südwestrundfunk)

p. 60

Lu tempu di li pisci spata. Print provided by Cineteca di Bologna

p. 66

O Pão. Print provided by Cinemateca Portuguesa

p. 68

L’industria dell’argilla in Sicilia. Print provided by Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino

pp. 79-80

Suco de sábado and El Eco. Prints provided ENERC

pp. 79-81

¡Que vivan los crotos!, La fe del volcán and Parapalos. Prints provided by INCAA

p. 127

Animal Movie, Paradise Lost and Walk-in-the-Forest. Prints provided by National Film Board of Canadá

Abnoudy, Atteyat al-, pp. 66-67

Achard, Juliette, p. 19

Agüero, Ignacio, p. 29

Alberdi, Tomás, p. 101

Audiopradif, p. 103

Bagnat, Christian, p. 32

Barjol, Jean-Michel, pp. 64-65

Bodet, Pascale, pp. 72-75

Bravo, Sergio, pp. 66-67

Breer, Robert, p. 128

Burillo, Patxi, p. 95

Calvo de Cabrera, Javier, p. 96

Camell, Blanca, p. 120

Chahbazian, Comes, p. 30

Charles, Miryam, p. 20

Colectivo Silencio, p. 24

Delgado Viteri, Daniela, pp. 118-119

Diago, Alassane, p. 26

Domínguez López, Sara, p. 98

Dvortsevoy, Sergei, pp. 64-65

Elorza, Maria, p. 16

Elzerman, Marieke, p. 98

Epstein, Jean, pp. 112-113

Eustache, Jean, pp. 64-65

Farocki, Harun, pp. 68-69

Flaherty, Frances H., pp. 58-59

Flaherty, Robert J., pp. 58-59

Fuentes, Oier, p. 94

Gábor, Varga, p. 28

Galbete, Peru, p. 18

Gasull, Aurora, p. 128

Gleyzer, Raymundo, pp. 68-69

Godard, Jean-Luc, p. 108

Grierson, John, pp. 60-61

Harvey, Sylvia, p. 103

Jalamo, Taisto, pp. 44-45

Jimenez Bohoyo, Iñigo, p. 94

Katsuhiko, Fukuda, pp. 84-91

Kleinhans, Chuck, p. 103

Komers, Rainer, p. 27

Lambart, Evelyn, p. 127

Landa, Mikele, p. 95

Lechosa, Luis, p. 96

Levaufre, Emmanuel, p. 74

Lockhart, Sharon, p. 25

López Luna, Anna, pp. 118-119

Lowder, Rose, p. 128

Lumière, hermanos, pp. 130-131

Marelli, Pietro, pp. 68-69

Marker, Chris, pp. 60-61

Martos, Deneb, pp. 106-107

Matthews, Wade, pp. 106-107

Maurer, Monica, p. 103

Menoyot, Ian, p. 19

Miéville, Anne-Marie, p. 108

Mokhtari, Ebrahim, pp. 60-61

Morla, Luis, p. 98

Munro, Grant, p. 127

Nestler, Peter, pp. 40-53

Nestler, Zsóka, pp. 40-47, 52-53

Obomsawin, Diane, p. 127

Oliveira, Manoel de, pp. 66-67

Otero, José, p. 97

Péo, Sérgio, p. 103

Pirritano, Paul, p. 21

Poliak, Ana, pp. 76-83

Reeves, Richard, p. 127

Richard Tamayo, Julius, p. 17

Rossellini, Roberto, p. 108

Ruiz, Alberto, p. 98

Ruspoli, Mario, pp. 60-61

Salaberria, Iñigo, p. 16

Sánchez Poxon, Elvira, p. 32

Schnell, Reinald, pp. 44-45

Serruya, Ilan, pp. 118-119

Seta, Vittorio de, pp. 60-61

Shaddad, Ibrahim, pp. 64-65

Strand, Chick, pp. 58-59

Sucksdorff, Arne, pp. 62-63

Švankmajer, Jan, p. 129

Teper, Clara, p. 21

Ulrich, Kurt, pp. 50-51

Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico, p. 33

Vilches, Gloria, p. 129

Wegman, William, p. 128

Wisshaupt-Claudel, Lydie, p. 23

Zambrani, Malena, p. 31

Zhu, Yunyi, p. 22

Zúñiga, Guillermo, pp. 100-101

10 watts bakarrik (Oier Fuentes), p. 94

Al borde del agua (Maria Elorza and Iñigo Salaberria), p. 16

Al-Sandawich (Atteyat al-Abnoudy), pp. 66-67

A Man and His Dog Out for Air (Robert Breer), p. 128

Am Siel (Peter Nestler in collaboration with Kurt Ulrich), pp. 50-51

Animal Movie (Grant Munro), p. 127

Antonio Valencia (Daniela Delgado Viteri), pp. 118-119

APOCALIPSIS 20 21 22 (Julius Richard), p. 17

Atti degli apostoli [chapter 2] (Roberto Rossellini), p. 108

Bardauri (José Otero), p. 97

Bide bazterrean hi eta ni kantari (Peru Galbete), p. 18

Boulevards de la Senne (Juliette Achard and Ian Menoyot), p. 19

Bouquet écologique 26 (Rose Lowder), p. 128

Caracol (Ana Poliak), p. 81

Ceramiqueros de Traslasierra (Raymundo Gleyzer), pp. 68-69

Cette maison (Miryam Charles), p. 20

Chaylla (Clara Teper and Paul Pirritano), p. 21

Chilefilm (Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler), pp. 42-43

Cile, 1972 (Monica Maurer), p. 103

Das Warten (Peter Nestler), pp. 46-47

De songes au songe d’un autre miroir (Yunyi Zhu), p. 22

Der offene Blick (Peter Nestler), pp. 48-49

Det stora äventyret (Arne Sucksdorff), pp. 62-63

Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Chuck Kleinhans), p. 103

Die Donau rauf (Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler), pp. 40-41

Die Judengasse (Peter Nestler), pp. 50-51

Die Nordkalotte (Peter Nestler), pp. 46-47

Die Römerstraße im Aostatal (Peter Nestler), pp. 52-53

Dog Duet (William Wegman), p. 128

Drifters (John Grierson), pp. 60-61

Éclaireuses (Lydie Wisshaupt-Claudel), p. 23

El andamio / La Bastida (Javier Calvo de Cabrera), p. 96

El eco (Ana Poliak), p. 80

El polvo ya no nubla nuestros ojos (Colectivo Silencio), p. 24

Eventide (Sharon Lockhart), p. 25

Fos-sur-Mer (Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler), pp. 46-47

France / tour / détour / deux / enfants [chapters 1A & 1B], (Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville), p. 108

Historia de una segadora (Fukuda Katsuhiko), pp. 86-91

Historia Naturae (Suita), (Jan Švankmajer), p. 129

Infernuan (Iñigo Jimenez Bohoyo), p. 94

Jamal (Ibrahim Shaddad), pp. 64-65

Kosmogonía. Film performance para un planetario (Deneb Martos and Wade Matthews), pp. 106-107

La fe del volcán (Ana Poliak), p. 80

La Montagne infidèle (Jean Epstein), pp. 112-113

La voz rosa (Marieke Elzerman), p. 98

Le carré de la fortune (Pascale Bodet and Emmanuel Levaufre), p. 74

Le Cochon (Jean-Michel Barjol and Jean Eustache), pp. 64-65

Les espagnols ont ils conquis les Andes? (Audiopradif), p. 103

L’industria dell’argilla in Sicilia (Pietro Marelli), pp. 68-69

Lu tempu di li pisci spata (Vittorio de Seta), pp. 60-61

Maayo Wonaa Keerol (Alassane Diago), p. 26

Madrugada en Lobeke (Aurora Gasull), p. 128

Mal siglo haya (Luis Lechosa), p. 96

Mi país (Peter Nestler), pp. 42-43

Miyama, Kyoto Prefecture (Rainer Komers), p. 27

Moana (Robert J. Flaherty and Frances H. Flaherty), pp. 58-59

Mosori Monika (Chick Strand), pp. 58-59

Nagyapám kertje (Varga Gábor), p. 28 No conozco la historia del fuego (Sara Domínguez López, Luis Morla and Alberto Ruiz), p. 98 Noizko basoa (Mikele Landa), p. 95

Notas para una película (Ignacio Agüero), p. 29

Notre village (Comes Chahbazian), p. 30

O Pão (Manoel de Oliveira), pp. 66-67

Ödenwaldstetten (Peter Nestler in collaboration with Kurt Ulrich), pp. 50-51

Pachamama-nuestra tierra (Peter Nestler), pp. 42-43

¿Para qué sirve un zeide? (Ilan Serruya), pp. 118-119

Paradise Lost (Evelyn Lambart), p. 127 Parapalos (Ana Poliak), p. 81 Peau de mémoire (Anna López Luna), pp. 118-119

Persona (Gloria Vilches), p. 129 Pira (Sérgio Péo), p. 103

Porte sans clef (Pascale Bodet), p. 74 Presque un siècle (Pascale Bodet), p. 75

¡Que vivan los crotos! (Ana Poliak), p. 79

Quedará el paisaje (Ilan Serruya), pp. 118-119

Rank and File, (Sylvia Harvey), p. 103 Renacuajos (Blanca Camell), p. 120

Riotinto, una modesta experiencia de reforma educativa (Tomás Alberdi), p. 103

Safare sayadi (Ebrahim Mokhtari), pp. 60-61

Schastye (Sergei Dvortsevoy), pp. 64-65

Sea Song (Richard Reeves) p. 127

Spanien! (Peter Nestler in collaboration with Zsóka Nestler y Taisto Jalamo), pp. 44-45

Stoff (1) (Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler), pp. 52-53

Suco de sábado (Ana Poliak), p. 79 Teléfono, Navidad (Malena Zambrani), p. 31

Tembiapo pyharegua (Trabajo nocturno), (Christian Bagnat and Elvira Sánchez Poxon), p. 32

Todxs queremos un lugar al que llamar nuestro (Daniela Delgado Viteri), pp. 118-119

Tótem (Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico), p. 33

Trilla (Sergio Bravo), pp. 66-67

Unrecht und Widerstand (Peter Nestler), pp. 48-49

Vive la baleine (Chris Marker and Mario Ruspoli), pp. 60-61

Von Griechenland (Peter Nestler in collaboration with Reinald Schnell), pp. 44-45

Walk-in-the-Forest (Diane Obomsawin), p. 127

Which Future?! (Anna López Luna), pp. 118-119

Y arquitectura un sueño de palmera (Patxi Burillo), p. 95

Zeit (Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler), pp. 40-41

Zigeuner sein (Peter Nestler and Zsóka Nestler), pp. 44-45

Zum Vergleich (Harun Farocki), pp. 68-69