Camouflage by Jonathan Perel
Film at Lincoln Center has announced the complete lineup for ‘Art of the Real,’ the ninth annual nonfiction showcase, which features a handful of Latin American titles including the opening night film My Two Voices by Colombian-American director Lina Rodríguez, the Argentine film Camouflage by Jonathan Perel, the Chilean film The Veteran by Jerónimo Rodríguez, This House by Haitian-Canadian director Miryam Charles; and the short films The Crow, the Trench and the Mare by Puerto Rican artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and the Colombia’s Abrir monte by Maria Rojas Arias.
This year’s edition of ‘Art of the Real’ is a vibrant slate of works by internationally acclaimed artists, and includes 17 features and four shorts. This year's filmmakers take aesthetically daring approaches to a range of pressing and perennial issues, creating meditative observations of natural environments, examining steadfast resolve in the presence of violence, and reflecting on global histories and economies. The series is programmed by Dennis Lim and Rachael Rakes, with program advisor Almudena Escobar López.
Director Rodríguez radically upends the conventions of the migration narrative in the deeply empathetic My Two Voices, rendering minute, close-up scenes of family life and domestic work in dense, sonic textures and the vivid colors of 16mm film. On the soundtrack, three women tell their stories of transit between Colombia, Mexico, and Canada in intimate voiceover: their reasons for migrating; the physical, linguistic, and institutional challenges they endured; and their aspirations for the future of their children and themselves.
Through a mix of staged and documentary scenes, Perel’s Camouflage follows a writer on his daily runs through and around the ruins of Campo de Mayo, a large military base on Buenos Aires’s outskirts that was an infamous site of detentions, torture, and disappearances during Argentina’s Dirty War. In a series of encounters with nearby residences, he asks: what is to be done with the remnants of this site of so many traumas, which still haunt the daily lives of those who live next door?
In The Veteran, tracing a wayward journey across Chile to New York and Iowa and back again, two friends attempt to research an urban legend about an American priest who, after dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, emigrated to South America. Through wry, circuitous voiceover and depopulated images of urban space, Rodríguez’s film weaves a maze-like account, staging a set of comic encounters between stories and places, between landscapes and the ideas we impose upon them.
Through staged tableaux, lyrical voiceover, and vivid 16mm cinematography, This House narrates the events around the unexplained death of a 14-year-old girl in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 2008. Collaborating with the teenager’s cousin, director Miryam Charles bridges locations—Haiti, Canada, the U.S.—and temporalities, proposing impossible narratives and alternate timelines: of migrations and homecomings, tragedy and the process of overcoming it.
The Crow, the Trench and the Mare, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s work of radical juxtaposition draws on methods of simultaneous narration from Sanskrit poetry to explore image and sound relations and the duality of bodies, objects, and places. Maria Rojas Arias’s Abrir monte combines archival footage and personal recollections to revisit the small town in the northwest of Colombia where her grandmother was born and raised, and which was the site of a day-long attempted revolution carried out by a group of shoemakers known as Los Bolcheviques del Líbano Tolim.
‘Art of the Real’ takes place March 31–April 7 at Film at Lincoln Center in New York City, with most of the featured Latin American filmmakers in attendance. For tickets and more information visit: www.filmlinc.org/festivals/art-of-the-real-2022
