Three Tidy Tigers Tied a Tie Tighter by Gustavo Vinagre
The New York Film Festival has announced this morning the lineup for the Currents section, presenting a diverse offering of short and feature-length productions by filmmakers and artists working at the vanguard of the medium. This year’s Currents slate includes two Brazilian features, and short films by Argentine, Colombian, Ecuadorean, and Mexican directors.
Having its U.S. premiere at the festival is the Brazilian film Dry Ground Burning / Mato seco em chamas, co-directed by Adirley Queirós and Portuguese director Joana Pimenta. An astonishing mix of documentary and speculative fiction that takes place in the nearly post-apocalyptic environs of the Sol Nascente favela in Brasilia. Here, fearsome outlaw Chitara leads an all-female gang that siphons and steals precious oil from the authoritarian, militarized government, while her sister, Léa, recently released from prison, is brought into the criminal enterprise.
Winner of the Teddy Award for Best LGBTQ-themed Feature at the Berlin Film Festival, Gustavo Vinagre’s Three Tidy Tigers Tied a Tie Tighter / Três Tigres Tristes is a warm, bittersweet queer utopia that bursts from the sidelines of Bolsonaro’s Brazil in this loose-limbed comic marvel. Set during a peculiar pandemic that affects people’s short-term memory, the film follows a trio of 20-somethings—roommates Isabella and Pedro , and Pedro’s visiting, same-age nephew, Jonata—as they explore a vibrant São Paulo one sunny afternoon.
Having its world premiere, the latest short film by acclaimed Mexican director Nicolás Pereda, Flora is a metacinematic reflection on the nature of representation and the ongoing drug war in Mexico, Nicolás Pereda’s Flora revisits locations and scenes from the mainstream 2010 narco-comedy El Infierno, exploring the paradoxes of depicting narco-trafficking on film—its tendency both to romanticize and to obscure. To screen is both to project and to conceal.
Two Colombian short films will also be screened in the New York Film Festival: Simón Velez’s Underground Rivers / Los mayores ríos se deslizan bajo tierra and Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau and Natalia Escobar’s Aribada.
Omens abound in Veléz’s Underground Rivers, which follows the quotidian journey of a young woman from Medellín’s center to the verdant forests beyond—all captured on grainy, desaturated film stock. Archery, fortunetelling, and even an acting audition figure in this loose itinerary, which eventually circles back to the film’s unsettled beginnings.
In Aribada, a German co-production, the scintillating color and dreamlike imagery of Colombia’s coffee region become a vivid landscape—a space between documentary and mythology, where Las Traviesas, a group of trans women from the Emberá people share knowledge and reinvent rituals. Here, Aribada, a half-jaguar, half-human monster awakens to the formation of their utopic alliance informed by the power of the jais (spirits).
The German-Brazilian short film urban solutions by Arne Hector, Luciana Mazeto, Minze Tummescheit, and Vinícius Lopes, follows a German artist on a picturesque journey to Brazil ruminates on the country’s lush floral beauty and its orderly architectures of civilization and security, as apartment complex doormen reflect on their experiences as caretakers, security guards, and confidants for the rich. Shot in vivid 16mm, urban solutions builds a complex, multi-perspectival portrait of the country’s class inequities, in which insurgent energies of the colonial past begin to break through its pristine surfaces.
Alexandra Cuesta’s enigmatic short film Lungta derives its title from the mythical Tibetan creature (literally, “wind horse”) that symbolizes the air or spirit within the body. Combining sound artist’s Martín Baus's distorted aerophonic score with blurred 16mm footage, Lungta foregrounds the material substructure of the filmic process while invoking the history of Muybridge’s earliest experiments in chronophotography, which gave motion to still images for the first time.
In The Newest Olds, Argentine director Pablo Mazzolo creates a kaleidoscopic landscape study of sites in and around the transborder agglomeration of Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, through his deft hand-processing and manipulation of 35mm film stock. Transforming this space into a pulsating environment of liquid terrain, volatile abstraction, and an ever-changing color palette, his short film also draws on archival sound and field recording to reveal the two cities’ energies of uncertainty and unrest.
The 60th edition of the New York Film Festival will take place September 30 - October 16.
