2024-04-26 03:15:25
Cinephile tribune in its own right, the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, the Baficicloses this weekend one of its most politically intense editions of its already prodigal history. The situation that the National Film Institute (INCAA) is going through, the body that governs and helps finance film production in the country, placed Argentine cinema on the edge of an abyss, and the discussions and debates in this regard extended to the presentation of each of the scheduled films. Someone will say that the crisis tarnished the celebration of the festival’s silver anniversary, with the situation stealing the spotlight from the artistic event. The reality is different.
Argentine cinema had a space in the Bafici where it could continue breathing, screens to make their diversity and hierarchy visible, and rooms that became cenacles where claims and voices could be raised to be heard. A quality that exalts the work of the festival and allows its 25th edition to be memorable. Still, it is not enough.
The future of the local film industry as we know it is threatened. If the current management of INCAA, led by economist Carlos Pirovano, manages to take away its autonomy, guaranteed by law, It will be difficult for there to be national films to feed the Bafici 2025 catalog. Festivao that this year selected 74 titles, which it considered worthy of being included in its program. If we add to them the more than 50 that the Mar del Plata Festival programmed six months ago, the question arises by itself: how many cinemas in the world can boast of such a level, in abundance and quality, as to produce 130 films per year? year worthy of participating in two of the most important festivals in Latin America? Just for that, out of mere survival instinct, It is important that, as an institution, Bafici reiterates with crystal clarity its concern for the uncertain future of the cinema that nourishes it and gives it meaning: the one produced in Argentina.
Proof of that quality are others five films from the Argentine Competition that could be seen at the festival. Few local filmmakers can boast a fertility bordering on filmorrhagia like Matías Szulansky. In eight years, this director has already added eleven feature films, the last of which, Berta and Pablojust had its world premiere here. Almost a vernacular exponent of the so-called mumblecorethe film follows Caro, an introverted young girl who travels to Buenos Aires from Montevideo to distance herself from her boyfriend, with the excuse of recording some songs with a friend with whom she shares a musical project and stopping by her grandmother’s house. recently deceased.
The film follows the protagonist during her walks through the city in the middle of a heat wave. Sometimes through distant planes that show her restless wandering; others, very close to her, with very close-ups that reveal genuine tribulation. When it seems that Caro’s destiny will be to sink into lethargy, a discovery among her books from her evil They give a new meaning to your trip. Even in its brevity (only 61 minutes), Berta and Pablo At times it feels artificially elongated from somewhat repetitive sequences, as if it were a medium-length film forced to become long. Despite this, Szulansky’s cinema shows a great evolution on the path that goes from Asshole, clown and fat (2017), one of his first works, until now. Emotional as it is sensitive, the film manages to overcome its excesses by making tenderness a timely narrative vehicle..
Classic not only of Bafici, but of contemporary Argentine cinema, Raul Perrone was once again part of this festival competition with the presentation of COMBO15. Anyone who is not familiar with the work of the filmmaker from Ituzaingó, a neighborhood west of the Buenos Aires suburbs, will find here a work representative of what he has been doing since the premiere of P3ND3JO5here at Bafici, but in 2013. A story as experimental in form as it is narrative., which once again has the streets of its small town as its landscape and the young people who wander along its margins as protagonists. For their part, those who know the filmography of this period in depth will soon recognize the authorship marks and, with them, the repetition of a format in which Perrone already tried to move comfortably. Perhaps too much, although that does not diminish the merits of COMBO15. Among them, the ability to handle the visual and sound planes as parallel universes, which when intersecting in the infinity of the room manage to alter the notion of perception.
Exponent of a format with a lot of tradition in recent Argentine cinema, Printers offers one of those stories that are nourished by the family biography of its directors to build a cinematographic portrait. Cinema of the self, which in this case is multiplied by three: the brothers Lorena, Sergio and Federico Vegaalthough it will be the older sister who has the narrating voice (in addition to directing the film with Gonzalo Zapico). Like two mirrors facing each other, Printers tends to infinity. It is a documentary about the process of creating a book, which in turn seeks to replicate a play, which is based on the figure of his dead father, a graphic artist by trade, who was united by an ambivalent love relationship. -hate (although the very existence of this film represents a clear triumph of one over the other). Fun, dynamic and emotional, Printers Not only reveals the power of connections (“What is a family?” he asks in off Lorena at the beginning of the documentary), but that of cinema to make the impossible possible, even immortality. Born and filmed during the pandemic, the film also reflects the positive nature that this social tragedy had for those, like the Vega brothers, who knew how to see an opportunity in it.
The Argentine Competition was completed with the last two titles. On the one hand Correspondentby Emiliano Serra, a fictional story that addresses the last dictatorship through the figure of a journalist who collaborates with the regime. A valuable attempt not only from a political point of view but also as an aesthetic challenge, carrying out an interesting work of art to record an era. Work not at all simple. With a family air in its atmosphere with The conversation (Francis F. Coppola, 1974), Correspondent she comes out of the challenge successfully, even with her excesses and shortcomings. Finally, Ships and cathedralsdebut film by Nicolás Aráoz, a fiction set in a town in the province of Tucumán. In it, the filmmaker exhibits a look capable of both flirting with genres and playing with a powerful naturalism close to documentary. A debut that shows him as a director to follow closely.