Liborio by Nino Martínez Sosa
The Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center have announced the lineup for the 50th anniversary edition of New Directors/New Films, which will take in a hybrid format between April 28 and May 8, and it will feature four feature films from Latin American from Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico.
This year’s lineup includes Liborio, the consummate debut feature from Dominican filmmaker Nino Martinez Sosa in which faith and magic become flesh and blood. Divided into seven sections, the film tells the legend of Liborio, a farmer who disappeared from his village near the beginning of the 20th century, only to be resurrected as a figure of spiritual healing and political rebellion, both an exalted messiah and a tangible human being. Using a prismatic storytelling approach, ultimately centering on the villagers’ fight for independence from occupying U.S. forces, Sosa weaves a tapestry made of multiple perspectives, a reminder that history is collective memory and shared myth.
An unusually ambitious epic told in eloquently simple brush strokes, Mexican filmmaker Pablo Escoto Luna’s All the Light We Can See is a daring work of minimalist gestures on a maximalist canvas, unfolding against the grand volcanic landscapes of Popocatépetl and Ixtaccíhuatl. Guided by mythic storytelling traditions, the film, set during some indeterminant past, begins as the tale of a woman who runs off into the forest when forced to marry a bandit, before gradually revealing itself as a time-bending work of metaphysical beauty, responsive to the light and terrain of this radiant corner of the world. A ghost story, an ode to nature, and an examination of the artifice of narrative, Escoto Luna’s film offers to its viewers a rich and immense folkloric power.
In Azor, Swiss director Andreas Fontana brings an astonishingly assured eye to this gripping debut feature set in the cloistered world of high finance in Argentina in the 1970s. With a finely tuned sense of impassive anxiety, Fabrizio Rongione (Two Days, One Night) plays a banker who has traveled from Geneva to Buenos Aires with his wife (Stéphanie Cléau) to disentangle the complicated threads left behind by a colleague who has mysteriously disappeared. Once there, he finds himself descending ever deeper into a sinister inner circle, connecting the country’s upper classes to the military junta’s ongoing “Dirty War.”
In the hauntingly oblique yet vivid moral drama Madalena, set in a rural Brazilian town, three characters’ lives are affected in different ways by the death of Madalena, a local trans woman whose body is found in one of the vast soybean fields that stretch across the region. For cisgender Luziane (Natália Mazarim) and Cristiano (Rafael de Bona), a bar hostess and a wealthy soy farm scion, respectively, her death occasions vastly different kinds of rupture, while for Bianca (Pâmella Yule), a trans woman and friend of the deceased, it is a more tragically matter-of-fact instance of increasing violence perpetrated on their community. Director Madiano Marcheti’s almost sidelong approach—with Madalena providing the film’s structuring absence—is a provocative challenge to conventional narrative and a rebuke to formulaic depictions of trauma.
Madalena by Madiano Marcheti
The 50th edition of New Directors / New Films also includes three Latin American short films: A Love Song in Spanish by Panamanian director Ana Elena Tejera; the Mexican short Hi, Grandpa / Hola, abuelo by Manuel Eguía; and the Peruvian short film Summits and Ashes by Fernando Criollo.
In A Love Song in Spanish, multidisciplinary artist Tejera makes patriarchy personal, tracing its long shadow from Panama’s military dictatorship to her family. Through careful observation of the movement of bodies in spaces imbued with memory and use of archival images, these intertwining threads reveal a tenderly crafted family portrait.
Loosely sketched pencil drawings illustrate Hi, Grandpa, the charming snapshot of a day in the life of the director in Mexico City, offering a sweet hello to her grandfather from a faraway place; in the Peruvian mountains, rituals offer connection between participants and the divine. Resplendently realized in black and white by director Criollo, the documentary short Summits and Ashes captures a place where the heavens meet the earth.
Additionally, to celebrate this edition’s 50-year milestone, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center will also present a free virtual retrospective looking back on the festival’s history, including two Latin American films: the Cuban film Lucía by Humberto Solás and the Brazilian documentary film Twenty Years Later by Eduardo Coutinho.
Among the most revered works of Cuban cinema, Solás’s masterful Lucía never had its stateside premiere at the inaugural edition of New Directors/New Films in 1972 because the print failed to arrive from Cuba due to the U.S.’s embargo. Some 49 editions of ND/NF later, we’ve come full circle: Solas’s vast black-and-white triptych, about three women negotiating their oppressive circumstances at three critical moments in Cuban history (the war for independence in the 1890s, the uprising against the Machado dictatorship in the 1930s, and the post-revolutionary 1960s), remains as astonishing and immersive today as it was way back when. Produced when Solás was just in his mid-20s, Lucía was, at the time, the most expensive Cuban film ever made; a singularly lush and dialectical period epic, it endures as perhaps that national cinema’s crowning achievement.
In 1964, Coutinho was making a film about João Pedro Teixeira, who was murdered by police as a result of his efforts to organize farm workers in northeast Brazil. The director cast nonactors in the production, including Teixeira’s widow as herself, but shooting was cut short in the wake of the military coup that same year; footage was seized, with a number of participants imprisoned. The project was finally revived 20 years later, as the country was transitioning to a democracy, but now the film took on a different shape: Coutinho incorporated the earlier material as well as new interviews with those originally involved and reflections on the injustices of the interval, yielding a prismatically reflexive, genre-defying essay on political commitment and life under dictatorship.
