The Museum of Modern Art will screen five films from Latin America—from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba—in the 22nd edition of Doc Fortnight: MoMA’s Festival of International Nonfiction Film and Media, taking place February 22–March 7, 2023, with in person and online screenings.
This year’s selection includes the Brazilian short Solmatalua by Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade, the feature It Is Night in America / É Noite na América by Brazilian director Ana Vaz, the Argentine documentary The Trial by Ulises de la Órden, the Cuban film Calls from Moscow / Llamadas desde Moscú by Luís Alejandro Yero, and the Colombian film La Bonga by Sebastián Pinzón Silva and Canela Reyes.
Solmatalua is set in a dreamlike Afro-Diasporic odyssey, landscapes and alleys meet at the crossroads of time, carrying out a mystical journey that rescue memories and discover possible futures. Vaz’s It Is Night in America was shot entirely on day for night, and is a wildlife eco-horror that follows the trajectories of endangered species fleeing to escape extinction, in a sombre plot in which the animals look back at us.
Based entirely on courtroom footage in which members of the military junta are tried for their brutal involvement in Argentina’s military dictatorship, The Trial is a tour de force of political filmmaking. Digging into 530 hours of archival material, the film bears patient witness to heart-wrenching testimonies by victims and families of desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) and the unimaginable horrors they describe. The formalities of the courtroom and the repetitive nature of the proceedings magnify the smallest of gestures and shivers of the human voice. An unflinching demonstration of the human capacity for evil, The Trial calls us to listen and remember.
In Calls from Moscow, the debut feature by Yero, an apartment in Moscow becomes the stage for one day in the lives of four queer Cuban exiles, shortly before Putin’s war changes everything. The film will have its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival this week, followed by its North American premiere at MoMA.
The village of La Bonga received a middle-of-the-night death threat in the midst of Colombia’s civil war, prompting the entirety of its Afro-Colombian community to flee for safety. Twenty years later, their mud-hut homes have vanished into the jungle. Sebastian Pinzón Silva and Canela Reyes’s accomplished debut feature accompanies these former inhabitants in their return journey, on foot, to a village that now only exists in their memory. Village matriarch Maria de los Santos leads the physical and spiritual journey, which culminates in a powerful testament to the importance of home, regardless of the crises that might befall it.
