2024-04-23 02:19:32
Made up of thirteen feature films and a similar number of shorts, the International Competition of the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, which this year blows out twenty-five candles, began to unfold in the various venues that make up the screening circuit. As always, the diversity of origins, styles and themes must be evaluated and discussed by a team of five jurors, but that instance will only arrive towards the end of this week. The French-Canadian-Ukrainian co-production Intercepted He has just participated in the Berlin Festival and has had to open the competitive game. Born in kyiv, but settled in Montreal, filmmaker Oksana Karpovych returned to her homeland during the harsh months at the beginning of the Russian invasion to record the images and sounds of the disaster. In any case, the central device of the film, as its name indicates, lies in interweaving that own record with the sound of a series of telephone calls between Russian soldiers and their families, intercepted by Ukrainian military intelligence.
“They gave us the order to kill all civilians,” says a male voice while the screen offers the shocking image of a group of people enjoying the coolness of a river, with the skeletons of bombed buildings in the background. “Kill them all and come home, Dad,” says a girl on the other end of the line. Another soldier describes to his partner the quality of the products he was able to loot (“It’s all brand name”) and, later, a young man who claims to be going crazy recounts the torture to which his enemies are subjected. . The result of this clash of images and sounds transforms Intercepted in a raw and powerful account of the depersonalization of carnage and horror, cooked on the fire of hatred, contempt and inflamed nationalism. Some isolated voices are raised against Putin’s regime and another affirms that what is seen on television is pure invention, but for the most part the dialogues exude brutality and dehumanization. The images of small towns after the battle offer a spectacle of destruction and, paradoxically, rebirth. Despite everything, life continues, although the wounds remain open, watering the earth and concrete with blood.
War and occupation are also the themes of Riverboomalthough the geography is different and the tone of the story is almost opposite to that of Intercepted. At the beginning of the 21st century, after the arrival of the allied forces in Afghanistan, the Swiss director Claude Baechtold, at that time a young man with no film experience, embarked on a trip through the chaotic Afghan territory with a French journalist and an Italian photographer, recording the journey with a small digital camera. Two decades later, the assembly of this material gives shape to a personal travel diary that mixes the collective experience of the trio, in particular their contact with the residents, with intimate reflections. Not without humor – in fact, the light tone is one of its trademarks – the documentary presents the events in first person, and Baechtold presents himself as a beloved son of the “epicenter of world peace: Switzerland. But it is the death of his parents that pushes the protagonist to accept the offer of the trip, which begins and ends in Kabul.
Following approximately the route traveled by the Swiss travel writer Ella Maillart in 1939, the three adventurers face natural and human dangers, interview feuding military leaders and discover an immense field growing marijuana and poppies, the economic support of the peasants and communal chiefs. Riverboom It also briefly recounts the history of Afghanistan from the 1940s to the present, reviewing the struggles against the Soviets, the origin of the Taliban regime and the intense political and social changes of the last twenty-five years. However, what remains in the memory, that of the director and also that of the viewer, is the intense human exchange between foreigners and locals, the strength of humanity in the midst of disaster. The urgent chronicles sent from there by the journalist Serge Michel, always illustrated by the photographer Paolo Woods, are today the excuse for a real adventure film that uses the material lost and found years later by Baechtold to reconstruct a period of his life and world.
Galician cinema is present in the Bafici competition with the new feature film by Alberto Gracia, presented a few months ago at the Rotterdam Festival. The third feature film by the director of The wandering star It begins with a scene a priori unrelated to the central story: a group of blind people go on an excursion helped by a sighted guide, but upon reaching their destination he commits suicide (or at least that is what it seems), leaving the contingent without support for the return home. . Thence, The Parra jumps to the presentation of its hero, a guy in his forties, unemployed and in crisis, who must return to his hometown in Galicia, Ferrol, to take care of the ashes of his recently dead father. Shortly after arriving, the dilapidated state of his father’s house forces him to stay in a hotel-tenancy.
From that moment on, the adventures of the protagonist – whom everyone begins to call Cosme, even though that is not his name – include drunkenness, encounters with not so notable people, a maritime disaster and the uncertain possibility of starting a new stage in life. life. There is some after time in The Parra, particularly during the night sequences, although the dreamlike quality of Gracia’s film borders on surrealism at times. At its core, it is still an eccentric, even fantastic, comedy, with touches of film noir that remind (albeit distantly) of Vertigowith its ghostly personalities and a central character, Damián, who begins to transform, little by little and without realizing it, into Cosme.
The International Competition also presented the actor’s debut film during the first days of the festival Taiwanese Lee Hong-Chi. Love is a Gun It begins like a film by his compatriot Hou Hsiao-hien and ends like one by Takeshi Kitano.
The first scene, a magnificent sequence shot with slow camera pans, which in turn uses depth of field to highlight the presence of this or that character in the frame, presents “Batata” (Lee himself), a young who just spent three years in prison for shooting a person. From then on, the story will follow him from Taipei to a small nearby city, in an attempt to lead a normal life, away from the small local mafias, while reconnecting with an old colleague in the criminal world and a former partner of school turned actress. Love is a Gun It is an uneven film – at times fresh and attractive, at other times derivative in substance and form – that reworks clichés but does not quite find the tone it aspires to build.
Riverboom It is shown on Tuesday the 23rd at 2:30 p.m. Cacodelphia 2.
The Parra It is exhibited on Thursday the 25th at 2:25 p.m. at Centro Cultural San Martín 1.
Love is a Gun It is exhibited on Wednesday the 24th at 11:45 at Centro Cultural San Martín 1.