La vida en común by Ezequiel Yanco
Film at Lincoln Center has announced the lineup for the seventh annual edition of ‘Art of the Real,’ the annual nonfiction showcase taking place November 13-26, 2020—rescheduled from its original dates in April—and screening a handful of Latin American films among the 16 features and 11 shorts that will stream over the course of two weeks in the FLC Virtual Cinema.
Three Argentine films will be screening as part of this year’s Art of the Real: Ezequiel Yanco’s La vida en común, about an indigenous community’s allegorical battle with a quasi-mythical beast; Jonathan Perel’s Corporate Accountability, which looks back at companies’ roles in brutally quashing worker organization during Argentina’s military dictatorship; and Eloisa Soláas’s The Faculties, which reflects on the state of education in Argentina through the experiences of 12 students preparing for final exams.
Art of the Real will also screen Ignacio Agüero’s I Never Climbed the Provincia, which collects the forgotten microhistories of the filmmaker’s neighborhood in Santiago, Chile; and the Ecuadorean short Notes, Imprints (on Love), Part 2: Carmela, the second part of Alexandra Cuesta’s diaristic diptych focuses on the filmmaker’s own grandmother through the prism of her garden, her music, and her reflections on a life well-spent.
Two other co-productions round-up the Latin American participation in this year’s nonfiction festival: Jessica Sarah Rinland’s elliptical examination of original versus copy through an array of animals and artifacts in Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another, an Argentine co-production; and the Japanese-Mexican film Cenote in which director Kaori Oda explores the mystical energies of natural formations on the Yucatan Peninsula.
Below are the complete details:
I NEVER CLIMBED THE PROVINCIA / NUNCA SUBÍ EL PROVINCIA
(Ignacio Agüero, 2019, Chile, 92 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
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Master filmmaker Ignacio Agüero continues his series of intimate, Chris Marker–like cine-essays with this chronicle of the neighborhood in Santiago, Chile, where he has lived for more than half a century. Quietly mixing observational street photography with ad hoc interviews with friends and neighbors, the filmmaker locates the forgotten microhistories of the buildings, businesses, and people in this small corner of the world, while also meditating on the shadowy legacy of Chile’s military dictatorship. What emerges is a sense of Agüero’s inclusive and capacious curiosity about people and the world, driven by a regard for cinema as a space as communal as it is personal.
CORPORATE ACCOUNTABILITY / RESPONSABILIDAD EMPRESARIAL
(Jonathan Perel, 2020, Argentina, 68 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
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The history of Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship, extending from 1976 to 1983, is also a history of complicity: one in which wealthy capitalists and corporations collaborated with the far-right death squads of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance to crush dissent and worker organization. Jonathan Perel’s film is a sustained examination of the involvement of these companies—both domestic and multinational, and many still extant—in the arrests, torture, deaths, and disappearances of tens of thousands of their own workers. Images of factory buildings and corporate headquarters, shot from the inside of Perel’s car, lend the film the tense air of a conspiracy thriller, but its rigorous structure methodically details a history that is all too real, and all too present.
LA VIDA EN COMÚN
(Ezequiel Yanco, 2019, Argentina/France, 70 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
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The desert plains of Northern Argentina provide the immersive setting for Ezequiel Yanco’s lyrical and closely observed hybrid documentary about an indigenous community’s allegorical struggle with a rampaging puma that’s terrorizing its livestock. Pushing Jean Rouch’s style of “ethno-fiction” into the realm of the fable, Yanco portrays a land of mythic beasts and legendary creatures. A band of children and dogs roam the community’s government-built modernist constructions and the surrounding landscape in search of the cat, telling stories about the birth of the universe along the way.
THE FACULTIES / LAS FACULTADES
(Eloisa Soláas, 2019, Argentina, 82 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
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Soláas’s feature debut is a vérité chronicle of final examinations at Argentina’s public universities, in which students from a wide array of disciplines—botany, anatomy, astronomy, law, physics, music—prepare for, worry about, and ultimately partake in oral tests. Soláas trains her focus on a diverse and disparate group of 12 such students, capturing the intensity, nerves, and pressure bound up in their by turns dramatic and absurd experience of the examinations. A singular work of observation and pathos, The Faculties offers a thought-provoking meditation on the contemporary state of education and marks an auspicious debut for Soláas.
CENOTE
(Kaori Oda, 2019, Japan/Mexico, 75 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
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Oda’s sophomore feature trains its focus on the titular natural sinkholes, found in the northern regions of the Yucatan Peninsula, which served as sources of water for inland Mayans and took on a mystical aspect as thresholds between mortal life and the beyond. Oda’s Super 8mm camera immerses us in these sinkholes, locating a subterranean world of shadow and luminescence, an aquatic soundscape, and the immaterial reverberations of lost histories and forgotten memories swirling out of human sight only to be conjured again by an odd beam of light slicing through the darkness.
NOTES, IMPRINTS (ON LOVE), PART 2: CARMELA
(Alexandra Cuesta, 2020, USA/Ecuador, 6min.)
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The second part of Alexandra Cuesta’s diaristic diptych focuses on the filmmaker’s own grandmother through the prism of her garden, her music, and her reflections on a life well-spent.
THOSE THAT, AT A DISTANCE, RESEMBLE ANOTHER
(Jessica Sarah Rinland, 2019, UK/Argentina/Spain, 67 min. In English, Spanish, and Portuguese with English subtitles)
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An enigmatic and richly detailed meditation on the thingness of things, Jessica Sarah Rinland’s film investigates the ambivalent relationship between original and copy through a mysterious array of objects and animals: howler monkeys reintroduced into a national park in Rio de Janeiro; tusks salvaged from a shipwreck and then molded and recast; countless replicas of Greek and Egyptian artifacts. Captured in intimate close-ups and with vivid sound, these obscure acts of preservation and replication are rendered ritualistic, almost devotional, replacing unstable and ephemeral originals with duplicates that attain a kind of mystical perfection.
