Official selection

The Official Selection revolves around the international competition that on this occasion comprises eight short films and ten feature films competing for the festival’s three prizes: the “Punto de Vista” Grand Prize for the Best Film, the Jean Vigo Prize for the Best Director and the prize for Best Short Film.

Furthermore, this year the Official Selection includes three films out of competition: its opening session —the world premiere of Los caballos mueren al amanecer, by Ione Atenea—; its closing session, —Spanish premiere of Charm Circle, by Nira Burstein—; and the latest film by a master of contemporary documentary cinema, Kazuo Hara: Minamata Mandala —also a Spanish premiere.

Official Selection Jury

Marina Vinyes Albes. She has a PhD in Visual Arts from Sorbonne Université. She holds a degree in Humanities, specialising in Contemporary Film and Audiovisual Studies at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and in the Design of Cultural Projects at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Since February 2020, she is the Head of Programming, Exhibitions and Educational Services at Filmoteca de Catalunya. In Paris, she was a professor at the Faculté des Lettres of the Sorbonne and has worked at the Department of Artistic Projects of the Jeu de Paume, where she curated a number of film seasons between 2013 and 2018 as well as the video installations exhibition Omer Fast. Le present continue. In Barcelona, she has worked with the CCCB (Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona), the EUROM (The European Observatory on Memories), the Open City Thinking Biennale, the ICUB (Institute of Culture of Barcelona), the Loop festival and the “la Caixa” Foundation in the organisation of seminars, exhibitions, film programmes and other cultural events. In 2013 she was awarded the Walter Benjamin International Prize for her essay Usos y abusos de la imagen en el universo audiovisual de la Shoah (published by Documenta Universitària, 2015). Roger Koza. Member of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI). He writes as a film critic for the daily newspaper La Voz del Interior (Cordoba, Argentina) and regularly publishes in the Ñ y Quid magazines and on the Con los ojos abiertos website. He is the author of the book Con los ojos abiertos: crítica de cine de algunas películas recientes (published by Editorial Brujas, 2004). He is currently hosting the TV program El cinematógrafo and is the presenter of Filmoteca (Televisión Pública de Argentina). He is a programmer of Vitrina —the section dedicated to Latin American films of the International Film Festival of Hamburg— and of the Viennale International Film Festival. Since 2014 he is the artistic director at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Cosquín and, since 2018, at the Doc Buenos Aires. He has been on the panel of judges of a number of international film festivals such as Locarno, Rotterdam, FICValdivia and Ohlar de Cinema, among others. Christopher Small. Christopher Small is a writer, filmmaker, and programmer, originally from the United Kingdom but living in Prague. He is the principal curator of DAFilms, the VOD platform of the festival association Doc Alliance, and the Project Manager of the Locarno Critics Academy, a respected workshop in film criticism that runs during Locarno Film Festival. From 2019 to 2021, he was a programmer at Sheffield Doc/Fest, and curated the festival’s 2020 retrospective, Reimagining the Land. He is also the programmer-at-large at Kino Petrohradská, a Prague-based independent cinema. His first feature film, Communists!, premiered in competition at BAFICI in March 2021 and has gone on to show at festivals in Mexico, Spain, and Russia. As a writer, his work has appeared in several anthologies of film criticism as well as regularly in numerous international publications, including Cinema Scope, Filmmaker Magazine, Film Comment, La Vida Útil, Kapitál Noviny, Cineaste, and MUBI Notebook. His writing has been translated into Czech, Slovak, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. He is an alumnus of Berlinale Talents and a member of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI).

918 GAU Arantza Santesteban

Spain, 2021, 66 min, DCP, colour, Basque

Cinematography Maddi Barber / Sound Alazne Amestoy / Editing Mariona Solé / Production Marian Fernández Pascal (Txintxua Films), Marina Lameiro (Hiruki Filmak) / Selected filmography 918 GAU (2021), Lilularen Kontra (2021), Euritan (2017), Gorputz Grafiak (2015), Passatgeres (2012) /

Arantza Santesteban is dictating into a voice recorder. She is Doclisboa, Torino Film recounting her recollections. The first: the day on which she was Festival, L’Alternativa, Novos Cinemas arrested for membership of an outlawed political party which supported Basque independence, at a time when open conversations were being held with ETA and some political parties with the intention of putting an end to the conflict. It was on 4th October 2007. 918 were the number of nights that she spent in prison. More than two and a half years. The recollections narrated by Santesteban are full of details: the pattern of a carpet, sweat, a desire to smile, to roar with laughter. The narrative is constructed in such a way that the spectator gets the feeling of experiencing the situation first-hand. The scenes of the filmmaker recording her voice and narrating fragments of her recollections are combined with different documents: the court order, photos, letters. The documents are scanned, as if they also had to go through a process in order to reach the present and serve to recollect. Santesteban’s own voice accompanies these archival materials but we could say that it is a second voice. Different from the first one. The one on the recorder. This second voice establishes a necessary distance. Finally, the staged scenes: two women having sex, a girl dancing techno in a poorly lit discotheque, another girl walking through a wood, calling to the birds who land on her hands. Who are these women? Are they also part of Santesteban’s recollection? Other lives that she may have had? Are all these personalities combined into one? The different film devices that come into play make up a fragmented film in which the director achieves something that has never been done before: she addresses the issue of the Basque conflict from first-hand experience, transmitted from complexity and doubt. And, finally, the silence comes. Lur Olaizola

Baleh-baleh Pascale Bodet

France, 2020, 50 min, DCP, colour, French Spanish premiere

Cinematography Pascale Bodet / Sound Benjamin Laurent / Editing Pascale Bodet, Agnès Bruckert, Serge Bozon / Music Olaf Hund / Production Pascale Bodet, Les Films du Carry (Michèle Soulignac) /

A baleh-baleh is a canopy bed. It’s a luxury. Something de- Selected filmography sirable, perhaps. It is also a word that appears in an Asian tale Baleh-baleh (2021) Nearly a Century , that Pascale Bodet, the filmmaker, gave to a friend. A tale full of (2019), No Key (2018), metamorphosis. A tale about the desire for power. A tale from anThe Art (2015), SixPiece Suit(e) (2012), other time and another place, in the hands of a man from France The Square of Fortune and in this present time. A tale that, when this man found it, made (2010) / Cinéma du réel, BAFICI, Côté Court him talk and made him think. What does it mean to truly find a Festival tale or a story? It unleashes questions in us. Questions that we ask ourselves in solitude and questions that we ask others, and that others ask us. Questions about the tale and questions about ourselves. Questions, for example, about work. About earning one’s living. About feeling like a stonecutter, a rich person, king, or sun. About living or surviving. About the logic of desires. All this is Baleh-baleh, a film of questions. A portrait, too. A portrait of a man with a story in his hands and various stories in his life. The encounter of this man with three women. What we can guess about them and their stories, past and future, while they also think of this tale. Or perhaps not. It may be something else. He’s over there somewhere, rebellious, small, silent, a puppy. Perhaps Baleh-baleh is simply the story of a puppy. Of a puppy without a story. Or perhaps, as in the tale, it is everything in succession, a film with stories and a film without a story. An invitation to think stonecutter, rich man, king, but also sun, cloud,

stone. Pablo García Canga

Los caballos mueren al amanecer Ione Atenea

Spain, 2022, 80 min, DCP, colour, SpanishCatalan-English Out of competition Opening ceremony World premiere

Cinematography Ione Atenea / Sound Jordi Ribas / Editing Diana Toucedo / Production

At least two ways of making films come together here. The first is the film made by Ione Atenea in search of the three brothers and sisters who left the vestiges of their lives in a little house in Vallcarca, and the second is the one that these brothers and sisters —Antonio, Rosita and Juanito— thought up in order to give full rein to their unbridled interests and creativity. The eldest brother earned his living as a cartoonist for the Bruguera publishing company, the sister started a career as an opera singer, while the younger brother appears not to have had any career at all, something which also requires talent. They always lived together and one of their interests was to recreate scenes from Westerns, which we assume they did in the non-urbanised areas around Barcelona. Rosita was a consummate horsewoman and the neighbourhood children used to be dazzled when they saw her appear unexpectedly, mounted on the back of a sleek horse. On their death, the hundreds of photos they took of these films with no audience, the scripts and stories they wrote, the recordings of their collaborations on the radio, as well as huge collections of comics and records, remained shut away and forgotten until the appearance of some unexpected heiresses: the film director Ione Atenea and her friends. When they entered the abandoned house, they began to suspect that there was a sense to those objects that had lost their owners. And so, as if it were a collage, Atenea composes a portrait of these individuals, who are not exactly unknown, and offers us two axioms as if they were stolen from a Western set: that horses die at daybreak and that, when someone wants to shoot a film, they always end up finding a way to do so. Bárbara Mingo Costales

Hiruki Filmak, Zazpi T´erdi, Ione Atenea, Garazi Erburu, Iñaki Sagastume / Selected filmography Los caballos mueren al amanecer (2022), Enero (2019), 24/07 (2016)

The Capacity for Adequate Anger Vika Kirchenbauer

Germany, 2021, 15 min, DCP, colour, English Spanish premiere

Cinematography, sound, editing, production Vika Kirchenbauer / Selected filmography

An artist is preparing her first solo exhibition. She produces a short film for the occasion. A film which reflects on where she is and also where she comes from. A film made of photos and cartoons. Mostly of photos. Stills. And, between the stills, almost always, a black screen. A film made in part, almost without us realising it, with no images. A discontinuous film. A film made of discontinuities and about discontinuities. The discontinuity between the artist’s present and past. Between her family and herself. Between her and herself. Between what was her social class and what is now her class. Between what she wants to speak about and what she can speak about. Between her childhood in a village dreaming of becoming an athlete or designing fashion to escape from there, and her present as an artist who came out of there. Between what she feels (shame, anxiety, irritation) and what she thinks she ought to feel (indignation, anger). The artist’s narration, soft, with a unique rhythm, seeks, perhaps, to express what cannot be found in the images, continuities between worlds, between past and present. It seeks a meaning or, at least, some meanings. Meaning is, perhaps, a form of continuity, something that makes it possible to move from one image to another, to jump over the discontinuity that separates them. But perhaps there are no meanings or solutions in this film. Perhaps it is just, personal, made of details, fragments, vulnerabilities, contradictions, a story. Pablo García Canga

The Capacity for Adequate Anger (2021), Untitled Sequence Of Gaps (2020),The Island Of Perpetual Tickling (2018), Welcome Address (2017), She Whose Blood Is Clotting In My Underwear (2016), You Are Boring! (2015), Please Relax Now (2014), Like Rats Leaving A Sinking Ship (2012) / Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Festival du nouveau cinéma de Montréal, Doclisboa, Viennale, Pravo Ljudski Film Festival

Charm Circle Nira Burstein

USA, 2021, 79 min, DCP, colour, English Out of competition Closing night Spanish premiere

Cinematography Nira Burstein / Sound Tristan Baylis / Editing Michael Levine, Nira Burstein / Music Uri Burstein / Production Nira Burstein, Betsy Laikin/ Selected filmography

Charm is the power to please or delight, but it can also be a Charm Circle (2021), talisman, an amulet to bring good luck (like the breakfast cereal, Gangrenous (2020), Off & Away (2014), I Said a lucky charm). Charm Circle is also a place in New York, a part Light (2012), The Light of Queens. The entire Burstein family, three daughters and their House (2011) / Sheffield parents, once lived in a house there; a very charming family, alDoc/Fest, Valdivia International Film though their fate has been somewhat more complex. As Fabián Festival, Nashville Film Casas wrote: everything that rots forms a family. This film both Festival, Doclisboa, DOC NYC, Festival dei supports and counters such an idea, focussing as much on the Popoli dysfunctional present of this group of people as it does on the converging lines of their past which have taken the form of a debacle. The Bursteins are about to lose their house to the bank. The bank, as always in American movies (and life), is the owner of everything. And so Charm Circle is a melodrama which knows that real life also comes from a long tradition of family melodramas in which the house, as it falls, tries to take its inhabitants along with it. It’s also a musical, so as everything collapses, resistance sings. Between intimate conversations in the form of interviews and records of a past in which everything was new and worked, the film advances with its storylines. On the one hand the bank, on the other the wedding. One of the daughters is about to get married, a new family emerges from a polyamorous marriage of three. In the midst of it all, the eldest of the sisters, Nira (that midpoint between five people) puts together this catharsis-exorcism, a meticulously constructed home video dedicated to the entire world from her rotunda, in which her entire family is like the characters from a sitcom who have grown too quickly, and all the acidity which comes with old wit lays bare not just the deepest frustration but also the warmest sweetness. Lucía Salas

Evangelio mayor Javier Codesal

Spain, 2021, 138 min, DCP, colour, Spanish World premiere

Cinematography Javier Codesal / Sound Julia Sieiro, Manuel Benedí / Editing Javier Codesal, Julia Sieiro / Production Julia Sieiro, Javier Codesal / Selected filmography

Evangelio mayor is almost entirely shot in a building which was being renovated in Madrid between 2019 and 2020 to house the Josete Massa LGTBIQ+ public residential care home for the elderly, the first of its kind in the world. The film takes advantage of the site under transformation to stage two things. The first is the lucid and harsh testimony of Ramón Barreiro, struck by AIDS in the early eighties and a survivor after many years of struggle and serious aftereffects. The second, a series of dialogues taken from the four Gospels (especially John’s), in which elderly members of the LGTBIQ+ community cite “the old words anew and in a new way”, as one of the notices which can be read at the beginning of the film states. These brief scenes, a succession of tableaux which translate, paraphrase or gloss many of the episodes from the Gospels are designed to be “innocent among the innocent, blasphemous for the Pharisaic”. Provocation is by no means the primary intention behind showing them; nor are they composed of irony. Rather, the film understands that the biblical text, as the basis for rituals and stories shared by generations, is a vast framework or great code which can be harnessed dramatically. This is what happens in Evangelio mayor, where the episodes from the Gospel serve to symbolise content which is as anti-doctrinal as the experience of life and death of LGTBIQ+ people, and particularly of the most vulnerable among them, the elderly. “Thou art a Man, God is no more, thy own humanity learn to adore,” William Blake wrote in The Everlasting Gospel two hundred and fifty years ago. The people we see, hear and feel with materialised sensuality in Evangelio mayor go even further than Blake, for they urge us to admire the vivacity of their bodies and the warmth of their words beyond an incomplete adoration of the species and its timeworn genders. Manuel Asín

Evangelio mayor (2021), Calavera resumida (2020), Evangelio en Granada (Meta) (2019), Testimonio de Frederman (2019) / Film produced within the framework of the “la Caixa” Foundation’s Support for Creation programme

Film balkonowy Paweł Łoziński

Poland, 2021, 100 min, DCP, colour, Polish Spanish premiere

Cinematography Paweł Łoziński / Sound Paweł Łoziński, Franciszek Kozlowski / Editing Paweł Łoziński, Piasek & Wójcik / Music Jan Duszynski / Production Agnieszka Mankiewicz / Łoziński Production / Selected filmography Film balkonowy (2021),

People are passing by in the street under the balcony of Paweł You Have No Idea How Much I Love You Łoziński’s home in Warsaw. A few walk calmly, others hurry (2016), Father and along, some simply wander around. They may be taking a stroll Son (2013), Kici, kici (2008), A Woman From with their sons and daughters, late for work or an appointment, Ukraine (2002), The returning home tired out, or taking their pets out. All these peo- Way It Is (1999), Sisters ple are at different times in their life, with different desires, aims (1999), Birthplace (1992) / Locarno and goals, each with their own particular view of existence, some Film Festival, IDFA, have reflected on this more than others. This Polish filmmaker DOK Leipzig, Jih.lava IDFF, True/False Film (who already took part in the Official Selection of Punto de Vista Festival, ZagrebDox in 2009 with the film Kici, Kici) watches the passers-by from up – International Documentary Film on his balcony and decides to interrupt their walk and ask them Festival, DocPoint – a few questions. Helsinki Documentary Film Festival

Entrenched on his balcony for more than two years, Łoziński dedicated his time to approaching his neighbours, complete strangers and even his own wife and asking them point blank questions about the meaning of life. We listen to their unexpected replies, intimate declarations, banalities, philosophical reflections and even some insults. There are some very fleeting appearances and also recurring characters, and all of them weave a tapestry of human experiences, building up small stories that sometimes rhyme and interact. While remaining in one place, Film balkonowy focuses on getting to know others through the camera, in some way thanks to the camera itself, highlighting the power of the cinema to bring us closer to others. An illuminating film, light at times and serious at others, a film that looks outwards, precisely at a time when we have shut ourselves away from the world. Miguel Zozaya

Guerra Marta Ramos, José Oliveira

Portugal, 2020, 104 min, DCP, colour, Portuguese Spanish premiere

Cinematography José António Loureiro, Manuel Pinto Barros, Pedro Bessa / Sound Felipe Zenícola, Bernardo Theriaga / Editing José Oliveira, Marta Ramos / Production Abel Ribeiro Chaves, José Oliveira, Marta

To which war does the title allude? The initial response would be the Portuguese colonial war in Africa (1961-1974), the one which has hit several generations who still live, dream, work and die in both geographies, and whose memory is still far from complete today. The anecdotes about that war which run around Portugal, the small or great traumatic stories which people tell or keep to themselves nourish the plot of this film, conceived, walked, talked and written by José Lopes, its leading actor, along with José Oliveira, who co-directed it with Marta Ramos. And who is, or rather who was José Lopes? It’s impossible not to wonder when you see Guerra. Few presences have been more intense and moving than his. To begin with, José Lopes here is his character, Manuel, alias “Manecas”, a war veteran who lives, walks and dreams —nightmares more than anything— in Lisbon, who has a partner from whom he distances himself and a son who is better than him. He also has a mother, in the cemetery, whom he goes to see at night to recount the events of the day. And ghosts all around: his brothers in arms above all, the veterans he meets to eat, drink, sing and cry, all present though not all alive anymore. But there is a second meaning to that same title, a meaning which points to the permanence of all wars: yesterday’s wars, today’s wars, every day’s wars. Ones which have nothing to do with Manecas but with Zé Lopes and with everyone. These are the other wars that the film condenses, structures, elides, symbolises, spatialises, temporalises. Ana, the psychologist, says it in one of the most extraordinary sequences of the film, all overlapping words and images, while we listen to coffee filtering (coffee!): “You fled to Africa, you got on a boat, months and months, you killed, you saw people die... And did you come back a changed man? You died a thousand times, they killed you a thousand times, you killed a thousand times... Salazar? The blacks? The world? The money? You?”. Manuel Asín

Ramos / Selected filmography Paz (2021), Guerra (2020), 35 anos depois, O movimento das coisas (2014), O Atirador (2013), Times Are Changing, Not Me (2012), Sem Abrigo (2012) / Doclisboa, Mostra Internacional de Cinema de São Paulo, Porto/Post/Doc, MDOC - Festival Internacional de Documentário de Melgaço

Minamata Mandala Kazuo Hara

Between 1938 and 1968, the Chisso Corporation’s chemical factory, located in Minamata Bay, on the west coast of Japan, discharged mercury-laden wastewater into the Shiranui Sea. As early as the 1940s, the residents of the fishing villages in this area, who depended on the sea for their livelihood, began to contract a disease with symptoms that included seizures, paralysis, and sensory impairment, leading sometimes to death. In the late 1950s, the Minamata disease was officially recognised as a neurological disorder caused by the consumption of methylmercury accumulated in the food chain. It took over a decade and numerous legal actions filed by the victims, supported by an important social activist movement, for the courts to indict Chisso for their negligence and responsibility in the poisoning. In the following decades victims have been entangled in endless litigation processes, discussions over the certification of the disease and their right to compensation. The social and political aspects of what happened in Minamata have been documented by, among others, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, who developed a remarkable work of advocacy for these communities, directing a long and committed series of films shot over a period of forty years. Director Hara Kazuo follows in the footsteps of Tsuchimoto, to whom this film is dedicated, by looking carefully at “how the neglectful attitude of the government and the politics

Japan, 2020, 372 min, DCP, colour, Japanese Out of competition Spanish premiere

Cinematography Kazuo Hara, Noa Nagaoka / Sound Takeshi Ogawa/ Editing Takeshi Hata / Music T 80 Chochek by D.K. Heroes / Production Koji Namikoshi, Sachiko Kobayashi, Kazuo Hara, Noa Nagaoka, Chihiro Shimano / Selected filmography Minamata Mandala (2020), Reiwa Uprising (2019), Sennan Asbestos Disaster (2017), The Many Faces of Chika (2005), A Dedicated Life (1994), The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches affect the people in their hearts.” Shot and edited over a period of On (1987), Extreme Private Eros: Love fifteen years, the film engages with a group of people fighting yet Song 1974 (1974), another court case against the local authorities and addresses the Goodbye CP (1972) / Shanghai International complex questions —personal, political, and scientific— that de- Film Festival, Busan fine this environmental issue. The long duration of the film is esInternational Film Festival, Hong Kong sential to sharing something vital about the experience and lives International Film of these people and about the protracted nature of a problem that Festival, IFFR, Sheffield Doc/Fest has afflicted these communities for so long and which concerns us all. Minamata Mandala is a profound and urgent reflection on the legacy of the Minamata struggles and an indictment of the authorities’ systemic failure to protect the people affected by the disease. Hara, known for his hard-hitting documentaries about the struggle of individuals opposing the establishment, draws a portrait of a collective struggle, praising “the fighting spirit of everyday people”. Ricardo Matos Cabo

Mille cipressi Luca Ferri

Italy, 2021, 13 min, DCP, colour, Italian Spanish premiere

Cinematography Paolo Arnoldi / Editing Andrea Miele / Production Lab 80 film / Selected filmography Mille

“The centimetre is arid.” Mille cipressi is a short film in which we hear this strange remark and, when we hear it, it seems obvious to us. It is a film that is shot almost completely in a tomb. The Brion tomb. A tomb erected during the seventies, the work of the Venetian architect, Carlo Scarpa. A film in which we can also listen to a lecture delivered at a conference by Scarpa himself. A lecture in which there are remarks such as the one about the centimetre. Also remarks on materials. On construction problems. On the possibility of classicism in the present. And, also: “If architecture is good, then the person listening to it and seeing it feels its benefits without realising it”. This is a film in which, while hearing these remarks, we see details of the tomb, shot with the warmth and slightly myopic attention of the super-8. We see light, water, lines, surfaces and openings. We see that the water is light and is surface. We see that, in its reflection, the water opens the surfaces and makes the lines dance. We see that, in this same way, the light traces lines and opens surfaces. We see triangular shapes, right angles and strange, broken circles. We see Scarpa’s work, detail by detail, work of light and time, a beauty which we do not completely understand and yet in some way perhaps, we find beneficial. A beauty which makes us eager to be precise and attentive. And meanwhile, silently, humanly, a figure, also precise in its way, walks through this space. Pablo García Canga

cipressi (2021), Sì (2020), La casa dell’amore (2020), Pierino (2018), Dulcinea (2018), Abacuc (2014), Habitat [Piavoli] (2013), Ecce Ubu (2012) / International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Pesaro Film Festival

Narciso Julio Fermepin

I’m here today, I’m leaving tomorrow, The next day, Where will I be? Argentina, 2020, 30 min, DCP, colour, Spanish Spanish premiere

Cinematography Julio Fermepin / Sound Juan Bernardis (Bum!Audio) / Production Ferme Films, Universidad del Cine / Selected filmography Narciso (2020), Luis Saenz Peña 1807 / BAFICI, Tranås at the Fringe Festival, Resistenza Analogica

The indigenous community of the Hornaditas lives in the well-known valley on the Río Grande, in the Argentinian province of Jujuy, which provides access to the altiplano that is the Quebrada de Humahuaca. Narciso is in charge of the water the community uses and walks around the valley digging and checking irrigation channels. Julio Fermepin accompanies him with his 16mm camera, recording the intense colours of his days. What is a valley if not an oasis in the midst of so much aridity? Everything is exaggerated in this space, even the green of the apples, in a shot where you can sense their sweet tartness. Finding himself accompanied by the filmmaker, Narciso provides a small self-portrait in which he first shows all his typical things (llamas and cactuses, real and plastic flowers, dried corn to make flour, the Argentinean flag waving in the air). The atypical is yet to come when he begins to speak not to the filmmaker but to a future audience as if it were actually there, as if he was being followed around by a group of people. Narciso also sets his routes to music for us with ballads, carnavalitos and chacareras. At one point, he shares the story of his auto-stone, a machine with which to travel all over the world, like this film, and like the lyrics of this carnavalito by Tarateño Rojas:

A letter you will receive, A portrait I will send you, But my person, You will never see.

Nenad Mladen Bundalo

Bosnia and HerzegovinaBelgium, 2020, 22 min, DCP, colour, French-Serbian Spanish premiere

Cinematography

After living in Belgium for 13 years, Mladen Bundalo still thinks of Bosnia as home. Is there an option which is neither leaving nor staying? Maybe it’s going back home to shoot films from time to time, even if you do it in the language spoken in the country where you pay your taxes. Nenad is about options and versions, about the number 3, which they say is the lucky number. But luck is not the same everywhere. In Nenad, the chaos of Bosnia is explained in groups of three. Three languages, three ethnicities, three presidents. The third option between east and west, the diminished option. How lucky is the ham in a sandwich? The middle brother? A point that is neither A nor B? This film’s quest is that of a third option which, if not superior, at least strikes a balance. While thinking what perhaps all migrants think, Bundalo meets Nenad, a 30-year-old man like himself who intends to emigrate to Slovenia. He spends time with him at home, at work (a train repair factory), in the bar and with his friends, who seem to belong to them both. What to do with the country that has befallen you? With the class that has befallen you, the time that has befallen you, which is one with no work, no family, no home, one made only of time to fill. Still and moving images coexist in the film, a distortion of time which is something like being and not being there, a coming and going which becomes a machine for constantly turning out memories for the future, which will continue to occur far away, in a country where the water is different and, so, as the Bosnians say, generates a disorder in the body like that in the photos, which is the origin of sorrow. Lucía Salas

Mladen Bundalo / Sound Nebojša Marić, Jeanne Debarsy / Editing Dhyaa Joda, Lou Vercelletto / Music [machina] / Production Pierre-Louis Cassou for La tangente / Selected filmography Nenad (2020), Why do you want to marry? (2015) / Sarajevo Film Festival, IDFA, Norwegian Short Film Festival, European Film Festival Palic, Mediterranean Film Festival Split, GoShort

No hay regreso a casa Yaela Gottlieb

— Yae, tell me the truth. You think I’m a fascist, don’t you?

Almost a Nazi, right? — A tiny bit.

Robert and Yaela, the director of the film. Father and daughter. He’s in Peru, and she’s in Buenos Aires. At the age of 25, Yaela is combining her search for work with investigation into her father’s past. The film is a series of conversations which reveal an antagonistic ideology. Robert’s mother emigrated to Israel after spending three years in Auschwitz during World War II and seeing the growth of anti-Semitism in Oradea, her home town in Romania. Robert is a Zionist. His daughter seems to want to reconstruct her father’s past to continue conversing. “Is Judaism a nationality? Is there more than one kind of Zionism? Are they like the gypsies? Are we like the gypsies? Is Ben Gurion a hero or a war criminal? Are Israeli Arabs Palestinians? What is a secular state? What does it mean to be Jewish? Just a religion? What is Zionism? Does Zionism segregate? Can you be a Jew without being a Zionist?”

Yaela has a lot of questions.

The film shows the director’s investigation, the journey she takes trying to understand her father. It makes use of a range of materials: the computer screen, mobile phone pictures, video calls, notebooks with sketches, tracings, the film script itself, homemade imagery. Lur Olaizola Peru-Argentina, 2021, 71 min, DCP, colour, Spanish European premiere

Cinematography César Guardia Alemañi / Music Ivan Caplan / Production Puré Cine, Pasajera Cine / Selected filmography No hay regreso a casa (2021), Pasaporte alemán (2020) / Festival de Cine de Lima, Festival de Cine de Trujillo, Festival Al Este Colombia

Podul de Piatrâ/Pont de pedra Artur-Pol Camprubí

Podul de Piatrâ is a Romanian song that goes as follows: Spain, 2021, 18 min, DCP, colour, CatalanRomanianSpanish

Cinematography Artur-Pol Camprubí / Sound Sarah Romero / Editing Jaime Puertas / Music Sarah Romero / Production 15L FILMS, Carlota Coloma Artés / Selected filmography Podul de Piatrâ (2021) / Festival de San Sebastián, Festival Márgenes

The stone bridge collapsed The water came and took it away. We’ll build another one over the river, downstream, One that is stronger and more beautiful! We’ll build another one over the river, downstream, One that is stronger and more beautiful!

Podul de Piatrâ is also the title of a night film. The night sounds before its arrival. An animal starts to breathe and a lamp turns on. The animal is a horse. A mare. It has just given birth. The newborn foal is wrapped in a semi-transparent sac and it appears to be struggling to break out. It turns over. It needs to break through in order to come out into the world. Angelica observes the scene in silence.

Angelica is a Romanian woman living in the village of Franja de Poniente and working at some stables. The Romanian song is coming from the television in her home, but the signal is distorted. Her husband will try and move the aerial to avoid interferences, but he will not be successful. This alteration affects Angelica and the entire film. Lur Olaizola

Les prières de Delphine Rosine Mbakam

CameroonBelgium, 2021, 91 min, DCP, colour, PidginFrench

Cinematography Rosine Mbakam / Sound Rosine Mbakam, Loïc Villiot / Editing Geoffroy Cernaix / Production Tândor Productions, Geoffroy Cernaix / Selected filmography

It is very difficult to talk about Delphine after seeing and listening to Delphine talk about herself, in a film that also specifically deals with the dignity and power of words when narrating one’s own story. A single space, her present apartment in Brussels, and a single protagonist, baring her soul to the camera of Rosine Mbakam, a compatriot who knew a very different country and life. Les prières de Delphine is a surprising example of joint creation in which empathy and understanding are necessarily directly proportional to emotional openness. In this intimate environment, Delphine recounts with courage and anger, with pain and humour, in an exorcism that becomes cathartic.

Delphine had a tremendously difficult childhood in Cameroon. Following the death of her mother, with an irresponsible father in charge of his family, she was raped at the age of 13. Destined for prostitution, another dramatic event in her family made her life there untenable, and she ended up marrying a Belgian who was three times her age with the hope of finding a better life in Europe for her and her daughter, in search of that European dream that never arrives. Just like many others, Delphine is part of this generation of young African women who are crushed by our patriarchal societies and delivered to this western sexual colonisation as the only means of survival. Through her courage and strength, Delphine exposes these patterns of domination that continue to make prisoners of African women. Miguel Zozaya

Prisme (2021), Les prières de Delphine (2021), Cinetracts’20 (2020), Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018), The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman (2016), You Will Be My Ally (2012), Mavambu, Portrait of the Congolese Sculptor Freddy Tsimba (2011), Les portes du passé (2011), Cadeau (2009) / Cinéma du réel, MoMa Doc Fortnight, True/False, Sheffield Doc/Fest, DokuFest Kosovo, IndieLisboa, Open City Documentary Film Festival, IDFA, Ji.hlava IDFF, Courtisane, RIDM

Saturn and Beyond Declan Clarke

Ireland, 2021, 60 min, DCP, colour, English Spanish premiere

Cinematography Andreas Bunte, Jaro Waldeck, Declan Clarke / Sound Adam Asnan, Jamie Lemoine / Editing, production Declan Clarke / Selected filmography Saturn and Beyond (2021), The Hopeless End

We learn many things in Saturn and Beyond. Everything beof a Great Dream (2016), Wreckage in gins like a treatise on a host of topics, at first disparate and then May (2015), The Most gradually interrelated. A refined presenter, none other than the Cruel of All Goddesses filmmaker himself, instructs us on electricity, on the wonder that (2015), Group Portrait with Explosives (2014), is gutta-percha, on the decisive role of Ireland in the develop- We Are Not Like ment of wired and wireless telegraphy, on the desire rooted in the Them (2013), Cologne Overnight (2010) / species to communicate over distance, about Morse and Marconi, FID Marseille, about the first transoceanic flights, about Saturn and its rings, St. Petersburg International Science about the underground seas on one of its moons, about the electri- Film Festival cal signals that run through the brain and, finally, about the relentless advance of Alzheimer’s disease in the world. All these themes link up in a logical manner through increasingly broad and intertwined correspondences, like in scientific method or cinematographic montage. And right then they begin to wane, to compose a more fragile figure: Alzheimer’s disease is also that of the filmmaker’s father, Paddy Clarke, an electrician by profession. Relics from Marconi’s day, the very ones he ingenuously gathered for Ireland’s first-ever albeit short-lived museum of broadcasting. The signals that Morse’s telegraph managed to send across the ocean from the westernmost tip of the island, electrical signals like the ones which were already failing to run through the museum director’s brain. The life which astronomers now look for with space probes in the water buried beneath the surface of one of Saturn’s moons, the life imperceptibly fading away in him. The planet’s rings, which one astronomer describes as the “natural end state of the collapse of a rotating cloud of debris”, not so different from the father’s wedding ring, which the son keeps in a cardboard box after his death. It is a characteristic of human beings to be everything to themselves and almost nothing to the whole. We call that brooding feeling of irrelevance melancholy. Manuel Asín

Self-Portrait: Fairy Tale in 47KM Mengqi Zhang

China, 2021, 109 min, DCP, colour, Chinese Spanish premiere

Cinematography Mengqi Zhang, Hong Fang, Qixuan Ding / Sound,editing, production Mengqi Zhang / Selected filmography SelfPortrait: Fairy Tale in 47KM (2021), Self-Portrait: Window in 47KM (2019),

What is in a self-portrait? For the last ten years, Mengqi Zi Hua Xiang: 47 Zhang, the young dancer, choreographer and filmmaker from Gong Li Si Fen Ke Si (2018), Self-Portrait: China, has been shooting films that embody this idea in their Sphinx in 47KM names. Nine of the ten films that she has made were shot in the (2017), Self-Portrait: Dreaming at 47KM village that is home to her father and grandfather, “KM 47”, a (2013), Self Portrait: place to which she returns each winter. Her self-portraits seek the At 47KM (2012), Self-Portrait With answers to all her questions in others. Her films have focussed on Three Women (2011) / her mother, grandmother, elderly inhabitants of the village and Busan International Film Festival, their recollections of the great famine of 59, on death, birth, chil- Yamagata International dren and their desires. Her idea of identity is progressively traced between memory (geographical, historical and family) and her Documentary Film Festival, Doclisboa specific acts, something she brings with her to the village each winter and which after such a long time has started to change the landscape (knowledge of the cinema, dance, a public library and a monument to those who died during the famine, among other things). In Self-portrait: Fairy Tale in 47KM Mengqi wants to build a house on a hill, a cultural place to dance, read, draw and make films. She is accompanied by a group of girls who get together to think about what the house should be like and what it should hold. The girls already know many secrets of filming. They have their own techniques for staging and acting, and these are used to record the whole process. Some act as comedians, others as drivers, teachers, dancers. All are filmmakers. A film in which the first person charmingly dissolves into all these characters and into a historical memory to come, one that takes any shape that these girls may wish. Lucía Salas

Soy libre Laure Portier

“Arnaud is my little brother. One day I realized that he had grown up. He was born where people have no choices and he is trying to be what he should have been. Free.”

Now in his adolescence, at the start of the film, Arnaud sees himself trapped in his neighbourhood of social housing, which seems to force him to resign himself to a life with no future prospects, one in which going to prison “is just another stage. I’ll grow up and forget about it”. But he cannot forget it: from then onwards, his goal in life is to escape from this supposed determinism and to build a different story.

Laure Portier narrates her brother’s odyssey in a portrait that is in fact a double one, because it is fundamentally a film about sibling relationships, by showing their own relationship and how it affects them (bringing them together and confronting each other), because she constructs it through the game of filming themselves, seeking to create a very strong bond between them. Not only is it a film about Arnaud, but with Arnaud, and when he takes the camera in his solitary trips, Soy libre takes on a different, new flight, starting from vagrancy and taking off to a new life in which we do not know how far it will go. A direct, very lively film, with room for tenderness, violence and hope. Miguel Zozaya France-Belgium, 2021, 78 min, DCP, colour, French-Spanish Spanish premiere

Cinematography Laure Portier / Sound Mikaël Barre / Editing Xavier Sirven / Music Martin Wheeler / Production Gaëlle Jones / Selected filmography Soy libre (2021), The Dog’s Eye (2019) / L´ACID Cannes, Brussels International Film Festival, Zurich Film Festival

To Pick a Flower Shireen Seno

The Philippines, 2021, 16 min, DCP, colour-B&W, English Spanish premiere

Cinematography, sound,editing Shireen Seno / Production Shireen Seno, John Torres / Selected filmography To Pick a Flower (2021), Nervous Translation (2018), Big Boy (2012) / Open City Documentary Festival,

“During my investigation, I found the photo of a young bride New York Film Festival, posing outdoors for a portrait, but instead of the groom, a plant DOK Leipzig, Singapur Film Festival was by her side.” A slightly broken voice-over describes the photo that we can see on screen. Indeed, a young girl in her wedding gown is posing alongside a plant. The next still shown is very similar to the first: another woman posing alongside another plant. However, this time, it is not so clear whether she is a bride. As in the first case, the voice-over once more describes the woman. These two photos are part of the archival photographs from the American colonial occupation of the Philippines from 1898 to 1946 and the voice is Shireen Seno’s, the film director. Her voice accompanies the entire film, whose starting point is the interest in the relationship between plants and humans. Balete, eucalyptus, molave, salingbobog, tamarind. Different plants of the Philippines photographed, many at the side of a white settler dressed in white and “similar to Kentucky Fried Chicken”, in the words of the author. In other photos, beside the plants Philippine people are depicted with more humble clothing and always working. From her initial interest in the predatory attitude of human beings in relation to nature, the investigation gradually leads us to reflect on colonial capitalism in the Philippines and on photography itself. The filmmaker recounts how a friend told her that taking a photograph is like picking a flower. “It’s pretty and you’d like to pick it but, at the same time, you’re killing it. The camera allows us to cross this narrow line between life and death.” Lur Olaizola

Transparent, I am Yuri Muraoka

Japan, 2020, 11 min, DCP, colour, Japanese Spanish premiere

Cinematography, sound, editing Yuri Muraoka / Selected filmography Transparent, I am (2020), IDEA (2019), Transparent, the World Is (2019), Schizophrenia

A self-portrait. We see the filmmaker and, also, she makes us see how she sees. A woman who tells us of her time in hospitals and clinics and, also, without naming it, her mental illness. She tells us about looking at her hands and not seeing them because they have become transparent. About not being able to have any certainty regarding the outside world or her own existence. She talks of solitude but also of family and home, of the pain felt but also of the pain caused. She talks of loving remarks which are also terrible remarks. She talks about all of this and, at the end, despite the shortness of the film, we have learned a lot about this filmmaker. But as well as talking to us, she makes us see and she makes us feel. She makes us see to make us feel better. She gives shape to what she is and to the reality in which she lives. To share an uncertain reality, she creates an uncertain, changing form. This short film, in order to make us feel something that is so vast and boundless, is full of ideas, fragments of life, details, formal inventions, images in black and white and images in colour, drawings, animated painting, images recorded with a mobile phone, images that appear within the image, realistic images, fantastic images. This is the self-portrait of a woman who can say: “How will the world change the next time I open my eyes?” Pablo García Canga

(2016) / International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Moscow Experimental Film Festival, Bogotá Experimental Film Festival, Athens Digital Arts Festival, Image Forum Festival 2021

untitled part 9: this time Jayce Salloum

AfghanistanCanada, 2020, 6 min, DCP, colour, hazaragi European premiere

Selected filmography untitled part 9: this time (2020), untitled part 2: Beauty and the East (2003), untitled part 1: everything and nothing (2001), This Is Not Beirut (There Was and There Was Not) (1994),

In 1999, Jayce Salloum recorded the Lebanese resistance Talaeen a Junuub (Up fighter Souha Bechara in her room in Paris, which was only to the South) (1993), Introduction to the slightly bigger than the cell she had just left after ten years in End of an Argument prison. Souha sits on the edge of her bed, looking into the eyes (1990) / IC Docs-Iowa City International of someone who barely understands her when she speaks Ara- Documentary Film bic and gently muses for forty minutes, not necessarily about her Festival time in prison. She wonders about things like why we put flowers in water after they’ve been cut. She smiles and sometimes openly laughs.

This recording was the first in a series called untitled video tapes which Salloum has continued to shoot to this day. They are testimonies given in different parts of the world, at random, almost on a whim, a bit like cutting a flower. The filmmaker does not seem to have filmed them just for what the words they contain say. They are punctuated with silences, and the eyes of the interviewees sometimes widen until they occupy the whole screen, distracting from their speech.

The ninth instalment of the series, very short and recorded in a rural school in Bumiyan, Afghanistan, shows four children telling jokes, taking turns to sing, as if in a television programme. The same character always features in the jokes: an ostensibly foolish little man called Nasreddin who is also actually wise in his own way. Can a documentary be just an ordinary, everyday gesture linked to life? Can a film be to the cinema what a joke is to literature as a whole? Can a filmmaker saw off the branch of the tree on which he is sitting? Nasreddin jokes have been part of a very long oral tradition for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. They have given rise to written collections, and similar characters can be found in many cultures around the world.

Manuel Asín