Bicentenario by Pablo Alvarez-Mesa
The Museum of Modern Art has announced this morning the complete slate for the 20th edition of Doc Fortnight festival, its annual showcase of nonfiction films from around the globe, which will take place online on MoMA’s Virtual Cinema between March 18 and April 5, 2021.
Among the 18 documentary features and four short films that will be screened as part of the festival, programmed by Sophie Cavoulacos, assistant curator of the museum’s department of film. there are four Latin American films from Argentina, Brazil and Colombia.
The Latin American selection at this year’s Doc Fortnight will feature the New York premieres of the Colombian film Bicentenario by Pablo Alvarez-Mesa, and the Argentine film Everything That Is Forgotten in an Instant / Todo lo que se olvida en un instante by Richard Shpuntoff; as well as the North American premiere of the Colombian film The Calm after the Storm / Como el cielo despues de llover by Mercedes Gaviria; and the U.S. premiere of the Brazilian film Êxtase by Moara Passoni.
In the spellbinding cinematic journey Bicentenario, bicentenary parades and reenactments along the path of Simon Bolivar’s liberation battles across present-day Colombia hint at the messy work of ritual and collective memory. Shot on 16mm, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa’s subtle political essay examine the fault lines between nation-building and myth-making and excavates the observable and ineffable traces history can inscribe on a landscape.
In Richard Shpuntoff’s, Everything That Is Forgotten in an Instant, subtitles and narration that zealously roam from English to Spanish, and between image fidelity and free verse, articulate identity within family histories of immigration. The result is intimate but dizzying, with narratives couched in urban and political history bridging Buenos Aires and New York City.
In a second searching portrait, Mercedes Gaviria joins her father, the Colombian director Victor Gaviria, on his first film shoot in a decade, to make her debut feature. The Calm after the Storm interweaves footage from the unlikely collaboration with old home videos and evocative field recordings in a pointed appraisal of cinematic heritage and gender relations, both on set and at home. Gaviria, an accomplished sound mixer, makes a quietly radical case for turning our attention out of bounds: what, and who, has been off-screen all along?
Moara Passoni, the co-author and producer of Petra Costa’s Academy Award–nominated The Edge of Democracy, transmutes a young Brazilian woman’s experience of anorexia into images and thoughts of almost ecstatic beauty. Against the backdrop of political and social upheaval in 1990s Brazil, and interweaving memories of her own adolescence with those of other women, Passoni goes beyond pop-culture conventions and the sensationalizing of eating disorders to meditate on the dissolution and perfection of the self, the modernist architecture of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia, the meaning of Humpty Dumpty, and what she calls “the geometry of hunger.”
