Mexican director Arturo Ripstein to be Fêted at Venice

Mexican director Arturo Ripstein will be be honored at this year’s Venice Film Festival with a Special Biennale Award in recognition of his fifty-year career.

“Arturo Ripstein is the most vital, tenacious and original director of the generation that made its debut in the mid-sixties, the heir of the golden age of Mexican studio films and the forerunner of the new generation of contemporary authors such as Carlos Reygadas, Guillermo del Toro and Nicolás Pereda, each of whom in their own way, recognizes the profound debt that they owe to his work” said Alberto Barbera, director of the Venice Film Festival.

“In his so many unforgettable films, most of them co-written with Paz Alicia Garciadiego, Ripstein has brought to life a restless and afflicted universe, populated with characters pathetically on the verge of the abyss into which they are destined to fall. The strange blend of beauty and brutality, compassion and violence, irony and sadness, adds a wholly personal dimension to his cinema, which delves its roots into popular tragedy and the atmospheres of melodrama, which he cleverly re-elaborates. These elements are also to be found, their power and beauty intact, in his latest film, which the Venice Film Festival has the pleasure of presenting in its world premiere screening,” Barbera added.

The award will be presented to the Mexican director on Thursday, September 10 in the Palazzo del Cinema’s Sala Grande, before the world premiere of his most recent film La calle de la amargura / Bleak Street (pictured right).

Venezuela Competes at Venice for the First Time Ever

A Venezuelan film will compete for the first time for the Golden Lion, top award at the Venice Film Festival, as Lorenzo Vigas’ debut feature Desde Allá has its world premiere next week in the official competition of the 72nd edition Italian film festival early September.

Desde Allá explores issues of social stratification through the story of a wealthy man who pays young men to endure a kind of contact-free abuse, only to find unexpected intimacy with one of his companions.

The film follows Armando, a denture-maker by profession who belongs to Caracas' upper classes, but chooses to live in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, where he entices young men back to his home with the promise of payment. He only wants to look, not touch, yet the distance he maintains with these men contains its own particular violence — a contact-free abuse.

Armando carries the scars of a troubled childhood, and when he hears that his father has returned to Caracas, long-suppressed anxieties resurface. At the same time, unexpected changes are occurring in his relationship with one of his paid companions, seventeen-year-old Elder. At first their association was purely transactional, but as the two spend more time together, something begins to emerge between them: an intimacy that neither man is ready for.

Starring Chilean actor Alfredo Castro and Luis Silva, the film was produced by Michel Franco, Guillermo Arriaga, Rodolfo Cova, and Vigas; Gabriel Ripstein and Edgar Ramírez are the film’s executive producers. The film will have its North American premiere in September at the Toronto Film Festival as part of the Discovery section, and it will also play in San Sebastian’s Latin Horizons section.

Brazilian Drama THE MOVING CREATURES Will Open in NYC

Cinema Slate has announced the New York theatrical release of Caetano Gotardo’s feature debut The Moving Creatures (O Que Se Move) on Friday, September 11, 2015, at Cinema Village.

The Brazilian drama was written and directed by Caetano Gotardo and features songs by Gotardo and Marco Dutra (Hard Labor). It stars Cida Moreira (below, as Maria Júlia), Andrea Marquee (as Silvia), Fernanda Vianna (as Ana) and Rômulo Braga (as Eduardo).

The second film in the ongoing Brazilian Film Series: Year One (after I Touched All Your Stuff, to be released on August 28), The Moving Creatures was an official selection at the Miami International Film Festival, and won a Best Actress (Cida Moreira; left) and Best Film (Fiction) award at Berlin’s Latin American Film Festival (Lakino). Available on the same day in theaters and, exclusively, to Fandor subscribers, The Moving Creatures will open in other markets during the Fall.

In Caetano Gotardo’s lyrical omnibus film The Moving Creatures, three very different mothers are confronted, through three very different trials-by-ordeal, with the limits of what a mother “just knows”.  With little fanfare (and not a whiff of the blatant “interconnectedness” often de rigueur among multi-story films), the daily rhythms and textures of three families unfold before us – and at the end of each story, all three mothers arrive at an understanding that can only be expressed by erupting the film’s very reality.

In the film’s first story, a mother (Maria Júlia, played by famed Brazilian actress, singer and performer Cida Moreira), learns about her son’s most intimate secret. On the second tale, an enigmatically afflicted sound engineer (Eduardo, played by Rômulo Braga) skulks through his day of nausea and confusion, while his wife Silvia (Andréa Marquee) muses on the scope of infant wisdom with a friend, as the two gaze at the former’s child. What happens next throws both parents into a state of shock. The final story follows João (Henrique Schafer) and Ana (Fernanda Vianna) on their preparations to re-encounter their long-lost son.

While The Moving Creatures is by and large as diegetically sober as a Rossellini or Dogma film, each act concludes with its respective mother breaking the codes of realism – and into song. For director Gotardo, who skeletally (and almost incidentally) gleaned the film’s material from three news items, music was the fitting choice of expressing the inexpressible.

For some, such untrained speak-singing about sex crimes and the life-lessons of arcade games may induce titters, but for the receptive, these moments are salient entries in the inscrutable lexicon of the heart.

New Films by Walter Salles and Carmen Castillo to NYFF

The New York Film Festival has announced today the complete lineup for its  Spotlight on Documentary section featuring 12 selections, including two directed by Latin American filmmakers Walter Salles and Carmen Castillo.

Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles will have the North American premiere of Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang, in which the director accompanies the prolific Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke on a walk down memory lane, as he revisits his hometown and other locations used in creating his vast body of work. At each location, they visit Jia’s family, friends, and former colleagues, and their conversations range from his mother’s tales of him as a young boy to amusing remembrances of school days and film shoots to memories of his father and the fact that if not for pirated DVDs, much of Jia’s work would go unseen in China. All the roads traveled are part of one journey—the destination of which is Jia’s relationship to his past and to his country. And the confluence of storytelling, intellect, and politics informing all of Jia’s work is brought to light in this lovely, intimate portrait of the artist on his way to the future.

The New York Film Festival will also host the North American premiere of the documentary essay We Are Alive / On est vivants by Chilean director Carmen Castillo. In it, the filmmaker questions what comprises political engagement in 2015, and if it is still possible to influence the course of events in the world. Castillo, herself a one-time MIR militant expelled from Chile by the Pinochet regime, structures her film in dialogue with the writings of her late friend Daniel Bensaïd, organizer of the Paris student revolts in May ’68 and France’s leading Trotskyite philosopher. In Europe and Latin America, Castillo finds the ones who have resisted, from the masked Zapatistas of Chiapas in Mexico to the Water Warriors of Cochabamba in Bolivia, from the Landless Workers movement in Brazil to the striking workers at the Donges refinery in western France to the homeless squatters of Marseille. A mournful premise lays the groundwork for a radiantly hopeful film.

The 53rd edition of the New York Film Festival will take place September 25-October 11 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

GÜEROS, An Auspicious Debut by a Film Rebel

By César Andrés Mena

Talent is needed to make films and some people are more privileged than others, and this is indeed the case for Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios. He began in the art world as an actor and theater director until he shifted his focus to the world of cinema. One could say he’s as a rebel with respect for the academia who’s broken into the film industry with an aggressive narrative and eye for cinematography.

After making two short films awarded with the Ariel (which can be found online), Ruizpalacios fell into his first feature that included writing his own script. When he finally hit a writer’s block during the writing process he invited Gibrán Portela to work with him. He brings to this film some of the elements present in his shorts; the black and white shooting, the dry and unexpected humor, the passion for balloons, road trips and how he handles certain sequences.

In an obvious exploratory exercise where he shows his best as film director, he recycles himself in the best possible way, perhaps knowing that a feature film gets more visibility than a short film. Standing apart and wanting to leave a mark not only within Mexican cinema but also worldwide— he indeed succeeded with Güeros.

The film is set today during a university student strike at UNAM. Tomás (Sebastián Aguirre) is a boy who is sent by his mother to spend some time with his brother Sombra (Tenoch Huerta). Sombra is a university student striking against the strikes and spends his days with his friend Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris) in an apartment turned pigsty.

Both Sombra and Santos are in a standstill while they should be finishing their theses. The strike is not important to them and they spend their days in idleness feeding the filth that eats their lives. Tomás begins to be imbued by this desolate place but he tries to resist himself. Epigmenio Cruz, an old and forgotten Mexican rock star who is on the verge of dying changes everything and the circumstances move the three characters to look for this mythical man. 

When I was thinking about Güeros, a successful film at many film festivals— awarded in San Sebastian, Berlin and Tribeca, just to name a few, I pictured a common road movie, with no high pretensions, that was able to create a climax going from point “A” to point “B”, without many  complications— I could not have been more mistaken.

Ruizpalacios surprises in his first feature with the total profusion in the visuals and argument— he had already showed us some of these elements in his shorts. With an explosion of creativity beyond the script and impressive camera work, he takes us out of our comfort zone, and what we are left with is the simplicity. Although his film is a typical black and white with not very garish characters that toy with being intelligent and to make it to festivals in Europe— he actually achieved his goal.

That’s why he is a rebel, an aggressor to cinema, a man who knows how to embellish his images and never tired of hand holding the camera. He plays confidently with his numerous shots, manages sound as he pleases, breaks what is obvious, makes us laugh with his characters and dry humor while still clever at times and not so much in others, but nevertheless funny.

It’s a film with many readings and an obvious social background represented in this fictional university strike, very similar to the one in 1999-2000, in a moment when the Mexican society is suffering critical and decisive moments, precisely around university students. Is this representation perhaps meant to draw the attention of his countrymen to awaken from a slumber of many years?

We can see this through the character that of the forgotten musician, a guy that Tomás and Sombra say could have saved Mexican Rock music and could have made Bob Dylan cry. He is  the forgotten superstar, the historical  figure that nobody remembers, slowly dying. A history that is forgotten can be turned into the biggest wrongdoing of a society, condemned to repeat the same errors later.

The connotation of güero, reappearing throughout the story and defined since the beginning of the film, is also the evident differentiation between Tomás (blond) and his brother Sombra (brunette). Furthermore, these young men move between several different zones in Mexico City, where they are identified as such even if they do not feel as such, there is a more than obvious rejection to the word güero.

On the other hand, Ruizpalacios makes some references to films where he plays with reflexivity— he plays with the audience, winking to us. These are some flashes of geniality throughout the script, making the film even more enjoyable.

Güeros is alluring to the eye, the ear and the intellect. It is a huge and risky work— a gem in the highest sense of the word. It is the consolidation of a director that will give us a lot to talk about and to who’s path we should follow.

César Andrés Mena is a film critic based in Costa Rica.
Text translated by José Raúl Guzmán.
This text is presented in a collaboration with the Costa Rica International Film Festival "Paz con la Tierra," as part of their Film Criticism Lab. Special thanks to Karina Avellán and Marcelo Quesada.

Landscape, Cinema, Memory: NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT and THE PEARL BUTTON by Patricio Guzmán

By José Miguel Palacios

Nostalgia for the Light (2010) and The Pearl Button (2015) continue the interrogation of the past that filmmaker Patricio Guzmán began with Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997). Nearly twenty years have passed since the release of that film, in which Guzmán brought back copies of his trilogy on Popular Unity and the coup d’état, The Battle of Chile (1975-1979), to confront the amnesic Chile of the nineties with documentary evidence of a past that had been unable to find its place within the democratic transition. [CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL TEXT]

This is the first in a series of articles co-presented with Colección Cisneros. The series explores themes in contemporary culture and the overlap between the visual arts and film.