Special Screenings
ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES – GHOSTS OF THE DAMNED EARTH
This year, building on an initiative by the festival organizer Cíntia Gil, we are cooperating for the first time with the UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art in New York. Since July 2022, the Artistic Differences program series has been hosting international debates and film screenings in collaboration with film festivals around the world such as the Open City Documentary Festival, FICValdivia and the Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival. At the heart of the series is an engagement with challenging films and artists who address questions of collective development and forms of togetherness. Within the framework of Artistic Differences, Cíntia Gil and Victor Guimarães (film critic and member of the 2023 Berlin Critics’ Week selection committee) have curated a program of four films – all of which run counter to simplistic ideas about contemporary history.
Guests: Cíntia Gil, Victor Guimarães, Jenny Miller, Christopher Allen
LAVRA DOR
Fri, February 17th, 5:00 p.m.
D: Ana Carolina, Paulo Rufino, BR 1968, 10 min., Portuguese original with English Subtitles
With fragmented montage and a deeply experimentalist desire to expand the possibilities of the film form, LAVRA DOR is a poetic essay and free reflection on the circumstances of Brazilian farm workers in the face of agrarian reform, and the impact of the 1964 military coup. Reframing the documentary form and using its devices and tools to deploy cinema as a critical practice, this film vindicates a new kind of spectatorship: one that questions objectivity in film, understanding the political processes that underpin every stylistic choice. Made in collaboration with Ana Carolina, the film puts together archive, documentary footage, and the words of the poet Mário Chamie, in a fascinating piece of cinema that challenged its time, its country’s regime, and our inherited conceptions of that historical moment.
O TIGRE E A GAZELA
Fri, February 17th, 5:00 p.m.
D: Aloysio Raulino, BR 1977, 14 min., Portuguese original with English subtitles
Texts by Frantz Fanon are juxtaposed with images of beggars, drunkards, and wanderers from the streets of São Paulo. Shot in a style akin to direct cinema, this film complicates and expands the testimonial power of the images by giving them a historical, philosophical, and political breath, not only through Fanon’s texts but also through editing that is both sensitive and unsettling. Faces and bodies, gestures and movements become a collective confrontation of their country, a breathless gaze into the spiritual and material conditions, asking for real progress in a society based on the poverty and exploitation of those who are the children of slavery. This is a powerful portrait of the persistence of life, of the resistance, and the dignity that persists within each person that refuses to accept the role they were given.
THE WHITE DEATH OF A BLACK WIZARD
Fri, February 17th, 5:00 p.m.
D: Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade, BR 2020, 11 min., without dialogue – German premiere
Memories of the slavery in Brazil’s past overflow into ethereal landscapes and harrowing noises. Through a visual poetic essay, this intimate and sensory journey reflects
on the silencing and invisibility of Black people in the African diaspora. Guided by the suicide note of enslaved Afro-Brazilian Timóteo, we journey through ghostly archival images that reflect the intergenerational legacy of slavery, in the territory with the highest number of enslaved Africans during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade era. Ribeiro-Andrade’s film is a haunting journey into memory and its ambiguities, its gaps and the effort to confront them, in a country still effected by the aftermaths of this underrecognized violence.
THE SECRET FORMULA (LA FORMULA SECRETA)
Fri, February 17th, 5:00 p.m.
D: Ruben Gámez, MX 1965, 42 Min., Spanish original with English subtitles
An essay in which a poem by Juan Rulfo, in Jaime Sabines’ voice, sets the tone and the depth. Full of surreal moments of beauty and provocative scenarios debating the historical contradictions and painful construction of Mexico’s national character. Also entitled COCA-COLA EN LA SANGRE (Coca-Cola in the blood), the film accumulates a series of metaphors that confront the construction of identity in relation to the power of the neighboring country, and the capitalistic colonialist force acting upon a society looking for its own destiny. Filming its country against the grain, as a counter-piece to the representations of the country by its contemporaries, this film’s baroque and irreverent style still resonates in our times in multiple ways.
Guests: Christopher Allen, Cíntia Gil, Victor Guimarães, Jenny Miller
MELTING INK
Sat, February 18th, 4:00 p.m.
D: Dominik Graf, GER/FR 2023, 167 min., German original with English subtitles
In 2020, the author Anatol Regnier published Jeder schreibt für sich allein, a book that examines the life and work of writers in Nazi Germany. In collaboration with Regnier, Dominik Graf, Constantin Lieband (script), and Felix von Boehm (production) have adapted this book into a polyphonic essay film of the same name (intl. title: Melting Ink) – almost three hours in duration – that takes a meticulous look at the contradictory biographies of Hans Fallada, Gottfried Benn, Erich Kästner, Ina Seidel and Will Vesper. What made critical authors like Kästner, whose books were burned, decide not to emigrate after the fascist seizure of power? Which now-respected artists actually sympathized with the Nazis at the time? What internal and external contradictions were posed by the experience of living and working under the regime, not only for authors but also for institutions like Berlin’s Akademie der Künste? The film makes extensive use of interviews with the likes of editor, author and publisher Florian Illies, art critic and historian Julia Voss and film producer Günter Rohrbacher. Running all the way into the present, it thematizes the trust placed in art and artists – and, ultimately, the complicated relationship between aesthetic positions and political actions.
We are showing the film in conjunction with our REACTION SHOT program.
Guest: Dominik Graf – The conversation will be held in German.
AKA SERIAL KILLER
Tue, February 21st, 5:30 p.m.
D: Masao Adachi, JP 1969, 86 min., Japanese original with English subtitles
Masao Adachi’s 1969 film AKA Serial Killer is a cinematic investigation of the places in the life of Norio Nagayama, who in 1968 at the age of 19 murdered four people in different Japanese cities using a gun he had stolen from a U.S. military army base. Masao Adachi was well recognized at the time for his collaborations with Nagisa Ōshima and Kōji Wakamatsu in addition to his own projects. He used Nagayama’s biography as a starting point for the cinematic realization – achieved together with cultural theorist Masao Matsuda and screenwriter Mamoru Sasaki – of the fūkeiron theory of landscape in film: This theory adopts a Marxist perspective on the effects of (urban) landscape on the individual. It examines how power relations are concretely manifested in a place and the people that live there, and asks how these relations might be exposed through the camera. In the film, Adachi, Matsuda and Sasaki (and the other artists they collaborated with) interpret Nagayama’s actions in decidedly political terms, taking them to be the result of forms of social oppression in Japan. To the sounds of an intense free-jazz score, they chart the trajectory of a young man who responded to capitalism’s profound transformations with violence. Yet they intentionally avoid portraying his acts, focusing instead on the violent nature of the landscape itself.
We are showing the film in conjunction with our REACTION SHOT program.
SATURDAY DISORDERS
Sun, February 26th, 10:30 a.m.
D: Lucía Seles, DOP: Sebastián Toro, Guillermo Romero, C: Martín Aletta, Gabriela Ditisheim, Laura Nevole, Pablo Ragoni, Ignacio Sánchez Mestre, AR 2022, 112 min. Spanish Original with English subtitles – international premiere
When you are the head of a tennis complex, you should keep your emotions separate from your work. – This is SMOG IN YOUR HEART in a nutshell, according to the film’s website. Six people who are at times sympathetically naïve, and other times psychologically manipulative, pursue each other whilst seemingly enraptured by their own fragility. They talk about a lot but seem not to speak the same language. What they hide is made visible in the editing. Idiosyncratic gestures, hidden glances, and a choreography of clumsy bodies draw us into an entertaining and absurd round of emotions that defies the usual expectations of a narrative.
SMOG IN YOUR HEART is the first part of an unusual trilogy (with SATURDAY DISORDERS and WEAK RANGERS) by Lucía Seles, which anarchically subverts rules of editing and dramaturgy to seriously reinvent the genre of absurdist comedy.
We are showing the film in conjunction with our SOFTLY SURREAL program.
WEAK RANGERS
Sun, February 26th, 12:45 p.m.
D: Lucía Seles, DOP: Sebastián Toro, Guillermo Romero, C: Martín Aletta, Gabriela Ditisheim, Laura Nevole, Pablo Ragoni, Ignacio Sánchez Mestre, AR 2022, 112 min. Spanish Original with English subtitles – international premiere
When you are the head of a tennis complex, you should keep your emotions separate from your work. – This is SMOG IN YOUR HEART in a nutshell, according to the film’s website. Six people who are at times sympathetically naïve, and other times psychologically manipulative, pursue each other whilst seemingly enraptured by their own fragility. They talk about a lot but seem not to speak the same language. What they hide is made visible in the editing. Idiosyncratic gestures, hidden glances, and a choreography of clumsy bodies draw us into an entertaining and absurd round of emotions that defies the usual expectations of a narrative.
SMOG IN YOUR HEART is the first part of an unusual trilogy (with SATURDAY DISORDERS and WEAK RANGERS) by Lucía Seles, which anarchically subverts rules of editing and dramaturgy to seriously reinvent the genre of absurdist comedy.
We are showing the film in conjunction with our SOFTLY SURREAL program.