February 22 - 26, 2019
Film Society of Lincoln Center
“New York’s Neighboring Scenes series has quickly become
one of the most exciting bits of any year’s film festival schedule”
—Joshua Brunsting, CriterionCast
Now in its fourth year, Neighboring Scenes is the Film Society’s showcase of contemporary Latin American cinema. Highlighting impressive recent productions from across the region, this selective slate of premieres exhibits the breadth of styles, techniques, and approaches employed by Latin American filmmakers today. Neighboring Scenes spans a wide geographic rang, featuring established auteurs as well as fresh talent from the international festival scene. Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Cinema Tropical.
Organized by Carlos A. Gutiérrez and Cecilia Barrionuevo.
All screenings at the Walter Reade Theater
165 W. 65th Street, north side, upper level, New York City
(212) 875-5601 / www.filmlinc.org
Special thanks to Emanuel Lobo de Andrade and Beatriz Canepa D’Alessandro, Consulate General of Brazil
in New York; Eduardo Almirantearena, Consulate General of Argentina in New York; Federico Zanatta, Consulate General of Uruguay in New York; Marcelo Alderete; John Campos Gomez; Pablo Conde; Erick Gonzalez; Meghan Monsour; Matías Piñeiro.
BELMONTE
(Federico Veiroj, Uruguay/Spain/Mexico, 2018, 75 min. In Spanish with English subtitles. New York Premiere)
Q&A with Federico Veiroj
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A clever and emotionally layered performance from Gonzalo Delgado is the heart of this fourth feature from Uruguayan auteur Federico Veiroj (The Apostate). With wry humor and an exquisite sense of place for Montevideo, Belmonte follows Javi (Delgado) at a crisis point in his life. He’s a successful painter in Uruguay’s capital city—presently exploring the tortured world of naked men while preparing an upcoming exhibition—but most of his time is spent working through strained relationships with his elderly parents, his pregnant ex-wife, and their 10-year-old daughter, Celeste (Olivia Molinaro Eijo). As in his second feature, A Useful Life, Veiroj demonstrates a deft ability to examine the art world with compelling ingenuity, this time through a genuinely funny and rich portrait of an artist pining for a luminous family life.
Friday, February 22, 7pm
OUTER EDGE
(Baixo Centro, Ewerton Belico & Samuel Marotta, Brazil, 2018, 80 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles.
North American Premiere)
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A beguiling and enigmatic nocturnal experience, set in the peripheral and desolate spaces of the Brazilian city Belo Horizonte, Ewerton Belico and Samuel Marotta’s debut feature gradually wanders into the dreamlike territory of a trance film. Using afro-descendent poetics in its dialogue and soundtrack—a combination of electro-funk and contemporary versions of ancient chants—Outer Edge follows its characters through a labyrinthine circuit of chance encounters to evoke a city haunted by its past. Belico and Marotta, along with director of photography Leonardo Feliciano (Araby), capture an atmosphere of madness and despair with an exquisite, clear-eyed sense of place.
Friday, February 22, 9:15pm
STILL BURN
(Algo quema, Mauricio Alfredo Ovando, Bolivia, 2018, 77 min. In Spanish with English subtitles. U.S. Premiere)
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Alfredo Ovando Candia was a military general who served as Co-President of Bolivia from 1965–66 (and again from 1969–70) after overthrowing sitting President Víctor Paz Estenssoro. His political and military service connected him to the largest massacre of workers in the country’s history, as well as the military campaign in which Che Guevara was killed. Incorporating archival footage recorded during Ovando’s de facto government, home movies, and interviews with relatives, filmmaker Mauricio Alfredo Ovando’s debut feature studies the many profiles of his grandfather to juxtapose his family’s memories with the official history. Winner of the Best Director and FIPRESCI awards at the 2018 Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Still Burn is a courageous, perceptive documentary about how collective and personal memories are created from—and ultimately shape—a complicated legacy.
Screening with PUNKY EYE
(Ojo malcriado, Luis Arnías, Venezuela/USA, 2018, 15 min. In Spanish with English subtitles. North American Premiere)
In Luis Arnías’s Punky Eye, memories become poetic vignettes, sometimes irrational, sometimes precisely conceptual, always stimulating and cinematic.
Saturday, February 23, 2pm
BUY ME A GUN
(Cómprame un revólver, Julio Hernández Cordón, Mexico/Colombia, 2018, 84 min. In Spanish with English subtitles. New York premiere)
Q&A with Julio Hernández Cordón
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The seventh film by Meso-American filmmaker Julio Hernández Cordón (I Promise You Anarchy) is a harrowing, blistering vision of 21st-century Mexico. In the near future, when women are endangered and the only order comes from the lawless and elusive cartel, a young girl named Huck (Matilde Hernández Guinea) must hide her gender in order to help her tormented drug addict father (Rogelio Sosa) manage an abandoned baseball field. Absurdist, macabre, and exhilarating, this highlight from the 2018 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight is like a cross between The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Mad Max, told through Hernández Cordón’s lo-fi futurist visual style.
Saturday, February 23, 4pm
NONA. IF THEY SOAK ME, I’LL BURN THEM
(Nona. Si me mojan, yo los quemo, Camila José Donoso, Chile/Brazil/France/Korea, 2019, 100 min. North American Premiere)
Q&A with Camila José Donoso
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As with her previous features, Naomi Campbel and Casa Roshell, Chilean filmmaker Camila José Donoso’s richly detailed film fully immerses the viewer in its world, mixing digital, video, and 16mm to portray its beautifully ambivalent subject. At 66, Nona (Josefina Ramirez, José Donoso’s grandmother) lives alone and is recuperating from cataract surgery while a mysterious fire rages across southern Chile and generates unrest in her otherwise sleepy town. Capturing her routines and relationships while folding in past memories and a violent pathology with the present, Nona. If they soak me, I’ll burn them. is as much an allegory of contemporary Chile as it is a deeply personal character study.
Screening with A LOCAL KIND OF GOD(Un dios local, Benjamín Naishtat, Argentina, 2018, 6 min. North American Premiere)
An experimental travelogue through India and its people, worshiping ancient gods and selfies.
Saturday, February 23, 6:30pm
THE WOLF HOUSE
(La casa lobo, Chile/Germany, 2018, 75 min. In Spanish and German with English subtitles, New York Premiere)
Q&A with Cristóbal León
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Evoking Colonia Dignidad, an infamous torture colony operating during the Pinochet regime, The Wolf House is an animated film unlike any other, an exquisitely handcrafted surrealist docu-horror-fairy tale about one of Chile’s darkest periods. It begins with Mary, a young girl who hides in a mysterious house in southern Chile after escaping from a sect of German religious fanatics. Using stop-motion techniques and combining elements of various fables, photography, drawing, sculpture, and stage performance, Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León have created a nightmarish shapeshifter of a film.
Saturday, February 23, 9:15pm
WIÑAYPACHA / ETERNITY
(Óscar Catacora, Peru, 2017, 86 min. In Aymara with English subtitles, New York Premiere)
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In Óscar Catacora’s acclaimed debut feature—the first Peruvian movie shot entirely in the Aymara language—an elderly couple living in a remote part of the Andes faces the challenges of daily life with courage and determination. Like the protagonist couple in Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Willka and Phaxsi stoically carry the sadness of being forgotten by their long-absent son, and yearn for him to return home from the city. With magnificent cinematography, this landmark film delicately draws the emotional story of the filmmaker’s grandparents, who taught him Aymara when he was sent by his parents to live with them at age seven.
Screening with BEFORE MY EYES
(ante mis ojos, Lina Rodríguez, Colombia, 2018, 7 min. In Spanish with English subtitles, U.S. Premiere)
Shot on Super 8mm, Before My Eyes is a calm and mysterious portrait of Lake Guatavita, which is considered the inspiration for the legend of El Dorado.
Sunday, February 24, 2pm
THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS
(Vendrán lluvias suaves, Iván Fund, Argentina, 2018, 81 min. In Spanish with English subtitles. North American Premiere)
Q&A with Iván Fund
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A remarkable ensemble of young nonprofessional actors leads Argentine director Iván Fund’s latest feature—an oneiric vision of the apocalypse in which a strange incident sends the adults of a working-class neighborhood into an everlasting slumber. Left to their own devices, the town’s children gradually adapt to a peculiar new world that remains largely undisturbed by mankind’s absence. Fund draws inspiration from Sara Teasdale’s 1918 poem of the same name, lucidly translating the imagery and themes of the original text into a lyrical film about the regenerative, blissful elements of nature in the aftermath of calamity.
Screening with THE CEMETERY LIGHTENS
(El cementerio se alumbra, Luis Alejandro Yero, Cuba, 2018, 14 min. In Spanish with English subtitles. New York Premiere)
Nocturnal, seemingly random images of Havana conjure up a dark, feverish, and deceptively political work about present-day Cuba.
Sunday, February 24, 4pm
ENIGMA
(Ignacio Juricic Merillán, Chile, 2018, 80 min. In Spanish with English subtitles. U.S. Premiere)
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Anchored by a potent ensemble cast led by the brilliant Roxana Campos, Ignacio Juricic Merillán’s assured and understated debut feature follows a 54-year-old neighborhood hairdresser who is asked to appear on an episode of TV show about unsolved mysteries dedicated to the violent death of her lesbian daughter in the streets of Santiago a decade earlier. As she decides whether or not to be participate, she confronts her family and their versions of the events that occurred years ago, learning more about who her daughter was.
Screening with SOBRE COSAS QUE ME HAN PASADO
(José Luis Torres Leiva, Chile, 2018, 15 min. In Spanish with English subtitles. U.S. Premiere)
Mundane, fleeting moments turn into film poetry as seen through the eyes of an exceptionally sensitive character (and filmmaker). Based on the book by Chilean writer Marcelo Matthey.
Sunday, February 24, 6:30pm
Centerpiece:
OUR TIME
(Nuestro tiempo, Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Germany/Denmark/Sweden, 2018, 173 min. In Spanish and English with English subtitles. New York Premiere)
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Gorgeously shot by Diego García, the latest from Mexican director Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light, Post Tenebras Lux) is a bold and heartfelt exploration of marriage and intimacy. Starring the director and his wife, Natalia López, as Juan and Esther, the film portrays the life of a couple and their two children on a cattle ranch for fighting bulls. Esther is in charge of running the ranch, while Juan, a world-renowned poet, raises and selects the beasts. Yet when Esther becomes infatuated with an American horse trainer, Juan seems incapable of accepting his own limitations. A Monument Releasing release.
Sunday, February 24, 8:30pm
THE DEAD AND THE OTHERS
(Chuva é cantoria na aldeia dos mortos, Renée Nader Messora and João Salaviza, Brazil/Portugal, 2018, 114 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles. New York Premiere)
Q&A
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Winner of the Un Certain Regard special jury prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora’s hybrid follows Ihjãc (Henrique Ihjãc Krahô), a 15-year-old indigenous Krahô from the north of Brazil, who runs away from home after he is called to direct his deceased father’s spirit to the village of the dead. Denying his tribal duty as a prospective shaman, Ihjãc instead resides in the nearby town of Itacajá against the advice of his wife (Raene Kôtô Krahô) and community. Shot on 16mm by co-director Nader Messora, The Dead and the Others is a dramatically intriguing, richly textured portrait of grief and the threats facing ancient traditions by modern society.
Monday, February 25, 9pm
A WILD STREAM
(Una corriente salvaje, Nuria Ibáñez, Mexico, 2018, 72 min. In Spanish with English subtitles. U.S. Premiere)
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Winner of the Best Mexican Feature Documentary at the Morelia Film Festival, the third feature by Spanish-born director Nuria Ibáñez (The Tightrope, The Naked Room) follows Chilo and Omar, who seem to be the only two men on earth. They live on a solitary beach in the desert-like landscape of Baja California and fish to survive. Selected by Film Comment as one of the best undistributed films of 2018, A Wild Stream is an engrossing portrait of the human condition, as well as an unusual and quirky bromance.
Screening with THE FORCES
(Las fuerzas, Paola Buontempo, Argentina, 2018, 18 min. In Spanish with English subtitles, North American Premiere)
Introduction by Paola Buontempo
This brilliant short documentary provides glimpses into the world of horse-racing, following young men and women on track to becoming jockeys.
Monday, February 25, 6:30pm
‘EDUARDO WILLIAMS SHORTS PROGRAM’
(TRT: 85 min.)
Q&A with Eduardo Williams
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Argentine filmmaker Eduardo “Teddy” Williams (The Human Surge) has been named one of the recipients of the 2019 Lincoln Center Awards for Emerging Artists, which recognizes diverse and exceptional talents across the arts each year. For this edition of Neighboring Scenes, we are pleased to present a selection of Williams’s short films and celebrate the young auteur as he continues to realize his bold, singular vision—featuring the North American premiere of his latest film, Parsi (in collaboration with Mariano Blatt), followed by a post-screening Q&A with Williams.
COULD SEE A PUMA (Pude ver un puma, Argentina, 2011, 18 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
A rooftop accident sends a group of friends wandering across a desolate landscapes until they plunge into the earth’s depths.
THAT I’M FALLING? (Que je tombe tout le temps?, France, 2013, 15 min. In French, English, and Spanish with English subtitles)
In Sierra Leone, a young man looking for a seed emerges from the underground, hangs out with his friends and begins a long, digestive trip.
I FORGOT! (Tôi quên rồi, France/Vietnam, 2014, 29 min. In Vietnamese with English subtitles)
A group of Vietnamese teenagers stave off boredom by leaping from rooftop to rooftop, window to window, one building to the next. Flaunting Williams’s free, immersive way with street scenes and his protagonists’ death-defying feats, I Forgot! offers a vision as spellbinding as it is terrifying, juxtaposing all-too-familiar everydayness with the sublime beauty of the reckless act.
PARSI (Eduardo Williams with Mariano Blatt, Guinea-Bissau/Argentina/Switzerland, 2018, 23 min. In Creole and Spanish with English subtitles. North American Premiere)
Commissioned for the 2018 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Williams’s latest is an immersive work exploring the rhythmic, discursive language of Mariano Blatt’s poem “No es” against the perpetually moving people of Guinea-Bissau.
Tuesday, February 26, 6:30pm
MURDER ME, MONSTER
(Muere, monstruo, muere tu reino, Alejandro Fadel, Argentina/Chile/France, 2018, 109 min. In Spanish with English subtitles. U.S. Premiere)
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In Alejandro Fadel’s genre-bending and offbeat philosophical horror movie, rural police officer Cruz investigates the bizarre case of a headless woman’s body found in a remote region of the Andes. David, the husband of Cruz’s lover, becomes the prime suspect and is sent to a local mental hospital, where he blames the crime on the inexplicable and brutal appearance of the “Monster.” Cruz stumbles upon a mysterious theory involving geometric landscapes, mountain motorcyclists, and a mantra stuck in his head, which is the film’s title.
Tuesday, February 26, 9pm
