10. Feb

CAPITU AND THE CHAPTER (CAPITU E O CAPÍTULO) 

D: Júlio Bressane, C: Mariana Ximenes, Enrique Diaz, Vladimir Brichta, Djin Sganzerla, Saulo Rodrigues, Josie Antello, DOP: Lucas Barbi, BR 2021, 75 min., portuguese OwEs – German Premiere

Watching CAPITU AND THE CHAPTER feels like seeing a person from the 19th century photographed in HD: the film is full of anachronistic details. Júlio Bressane adapts the Brazilian tale of tales on passion, jealousy and paranoia, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ Don Casmurro. He also taps its legacy, navigating the distance between novelas and tele-novelas, between literary classics and the huge production scales of contemporary soap-operas. Where does cinema stand in this dispute? Nowhere and everywhere, as cinema has its own ways: Bressane constructs a precise, austere film around actual soap opera stars (and funding) using a minimal set, with a house to gather inside and a few painted walls to stand in front of, a series of precious objects and deforming mirrors, and haunting, repurposed images from his previous films. 

VENUS IN NYKES (VÊNUS DE NYKE)

D: André Antônio, C: André Antônio, DOP: Chico Lacerda, BR 2021, 41 min., portuguese OwEs – German Premiere

Director and performer André Antônio splits himself in two. Playing both a patient with a foot fetish and the psychoanalyst he sees for his “treatment”, Antônio – and in turn his film – divides, blooming into a playfully ironic account of the doctor’s visits and a celebration of the patient’s imaginary world, where the sublime and the mundane co-exist. Over the last decade, the filmmaker and his colleagues at the Brazilian film collective Surto & Deslumbramento have been creating provocative frictions between fine arts and pop culture, which materialises again here in surprising encounters – between the philosopher Walter Benjamin, Brazilian poet Glauco Mattoso, bregafunk music and pictures of Pope Francis kissing people’s feet. In a truly eclectic collage composed of intimate images of armpits alongside advertisements for sneakers, memories of himself as a struggling queer kid, and dissident appropriations of film history, VENUS IN NYKES asks the question: can a foot fetish be a stairway to heaven?

Debate FOOTAGE FETISH – February 10.

Love and madness, in cinema and beyond. Looking at two films that indulge in fetishism – and also its evil twin, obsession – this debate explores the origins of cinematic voyeurism, and the fascination for images ghosted by history. We ask Júlio Bressane, a legend of experimental film, and André Antônio, a young troublemaker, about the latest Brazilian independent cinema, to find out which films get their blood pumping and which give them goosebumps.

Amongst the guests: Júlio Bressane, André Antônio, Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Christopher Small

In cooperation with the Brazilian Embassy in Berlin