Every Document of Civilization by Tatiana Mazú González
Four Latin American films—from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile—were among the winners at the 2024 edition of FIDMarseille, one of France's most prestigious international film festivals dedicated to the art of nonfiction cinema.
The Argentine film Every Document of Civilization / Todo documento de civilización by Tatiana Mazú González received the Georges De Beauregard International Award in the International Competition; An Oscillating Shadow / Una sombra oscilante by Chilean director Celeste Rojas Mugica earned a Special Mention in the First Film Competition; the Brazilian co-production A Fidai Film by Palestine director Kamal Aljafari won the Distribution Support Award and the Renaud Victor Award in the Ciné+ Competition; and the Argentine short film A Circle That Rolled Away / Un círculo que se fue rodando by Liv Schulman was the winner of the Flash Competition Prize.
Aiming to counter the inherent barbarism in the documentation of history and to describe the struggles of people who’ve been made invisible, erased from history, Every Document of Civilization seizes upon the case of the forced disappearance of Luciano Arruga, a teenager tortured and killed by Buenos Aires’ police, conducting a clinical critical examination, meticulously dissecting the traces of the State crime.
“The reality is a multi-layered mass grave; this film, a process of excavation”, writes director Mazú González. Placed at the point where Avenues General Paz and Mosconi intersect, where the teenager was last seen, her camera, as though to detect the invisible, obstinately scrutinizes the details of the landscape—asphalt, traffic lights, garbage—which, with editing, she brings together with a whole corpus of iconography that makes up the memory of the young man—footage of gatherings in his honor, graffiti, photos. In doing this, Tatiana Mazú González champions the truth of a counter-history, which the crystal-clear voice of Luciano’s mother, an admirable tragic storyteller, hammers home with anaphora, nuance, and silence. A brilliantly critical take on the strength of filmmaking and the editing of moving images when it comes to restoring the power of protest.
In An Oscillating Shadow, director Rojas Mugica and her father Lucho lock themselves in a darkroom to develop images from Chile’s past under Pinochet. Lucho Rojas was a photographer then, but also an underground opponent of the regime. His life wavered between taking pictures and making himself invisible—between light and shadow. “The exercise was, and still is, to close our eyes and imagine a place”: the method and discipline of the clandestine photographer. This sentence, the first in the dialogue between father and daughter that forms the framework of An Oscillating Shadow, also formulates the film’s theoretical hypothesis: to consider the image not from the point of view of the visible object, but of the faculty of imagination.
In A Fidai Film, director Kamal Aljafari jumbles up the film archives of the Palestine Research Centre (now re-named and re-indexed according to the vision of their new custodians, the Israeli Ministry of Defence) to bring out the underlying ideology, the exoticizing regard and the actions of dispossession, by deleting the comments of the victors and occupiers (from the British Mandate to the present day), adding, coloring, removing superimposed texts, modifying sounds, recombining and editing them. A gesture of anger and struggle in action and restitution of a distorted or erased memory, A Fidai Film lays claim to a form of cinematographic sabotage, a resistance-fighter film as the title unequivocally indicates.
Schulman's short film A Circle That Rolled Away is a disorientating journey, in which a series of brisk, astute sequence shots that form a continuous strip, the audience comes across the taste for words and speculative reflection typical of visual artist Schulman, a keen observer of the flows and affects that run through us and the ideologies that intrude upon us. In this film, psychiatry and the economic crisis are interwoven, coupled with a surprising and revolutionary method of contraception. The location, simultaneously the subject matter, setting, and theme of its cinematic performance is today’s Buenos Aires with its city center, hustle and bustle, billboards, and injunctions that characterize contemporary urban space.
The 2024 edition of the FID Marseille Film Festival took place June 25-30, 2024.
