Hybridity, the category of an era: truth, fiction and reality
In the last two decades, a term has become naturalised with which the difference between documentary and fiction is thought to be settled. The hybrid seems to constitute a synthesis of two antithetical positions that, since the beginning of cinema, have operated as a demarcation line between the real and the imaginary, between the will of truth and the will of fiction. There are those who believe that no term does justice to what happens with cinema, but there is no doubt that hybridity, rather than inciting us to think about what is happening with regard to cinematographic representation, tends to prevent us from going deeper and considering the relationship between cinema and truth, whether it is fiction or documentary.
Available online from May 4th, 3 pm (CET)
Panellists: Radu Jude, Marta Mateus and Gastón Solnicki
Moderation: Roger Koza
Radu Jude (Romania)
The winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin 2021 has been making films almost continuously since 2006. His short film The Tube with a Hat (2006) won the top prize at Sundance 2007. Since then, his films have been seen at all the world’s leading festivals: Berlinale, Locarno, Cannes, Karlovy Vary, Viennale, San Sebastián. The Happiest Girl in the World (2009) won the CICAE award at the Berlinale-Forum 2009. A few years later, Aferim! (2015) won the Silver Bear at Berlin and immediately afterwards Scarred Hearts (2016) was recognised at Locarno with the Jury Prize. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018) won the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. In 2020, Jude premiered two distinctive films from his filmography at the same festival: Uppercase Print and The Exit of the Trains (2020), both in the Forum section of the Berlinale. The following year, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) won the top prize at the Berlinale.
Marta Mateus (Portugal)
Filmmaker and producer, she studied philosophy, drawing and photography, music and theater. Her first film, Farpões Baldios (2017), premiered at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes and screened at several festival such as New York Film Festival, Viennale, Mar del Plata and Courtisane, having been awarded a Grand Prize at the Curtas Vila do Conde, Grand Prize at the Hiroshima Film Festival and the CAMIRA Prize at the Vérin Film Festival. She has participated at several group exhibitions in Museu das Belas Artes do Porto, Musée Lambert, Académie des Beaux-Arts – Institute de France, Appleton Square, Quetzal Art Center. In 2018-19, she was an Artist Member of the Casa de Velázquez, Académie de France à Madrid. In 2018 she created Clarão Companhia, a cooperative structure dedicated to the production and development of cinema and video projects, literature and other collective artistic works.
Gastón Solnicki (Argentina)
Gastón Solnicki is a film director and producer. He studied at the International Center of Photography and received his Bachelor in Film from the Tisch School of the Arts – NYU. He directed his first film Süden in 2008. His second feature film Papirosen premiered at Locarno in 2011, and won the Best Film Award at BAFICI. Solnicki’s third film, Kékszakállú (2016), won the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film at Venice. It was subsequently screened at TIFF, NYFF and Viennale. Kékszakállú was selected by leading magazine Artforum as one of the ten best films of 2016. In 2018, he directed and produced Introduzione all’Oscuro, which premiered at the 75th Venice Film Festival. His films have recently been acquired by MoMA.
The mysterious object: an enquiry into all the films that are left out of the visibility of festivals
A disturbing problem: more and more films are being made and, mysteriously, more and more films are left out of the festival exhibition system altogether. The circulation has changed, but not the calls for entries, the criteria and the selection methods. At the same time, there is still a system of legitimisation in the hands of two or three festivals that end up influencing the programming of almost all the festivals in the world. How can we still find the unknown film, the awaited mysterious object that will revive faith in cinema?
Available online from May 5th, 3 pm (CET)
Panellists: Eva Sangiorgi and Jean-Pierre Rehm
Moderation: Roger Koza
Eva Sangiorgi (Italy) is a writer and programmer based in Vienna. She collaborated with different festivals in Latin America and founded FICUNAM in Mexico City, festival she headed until 2018. She also worked in film distribution, production and television broadcast. In Mexico she launched and coordinated some publications on contemporary cinema for the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM and she has maintained interest in that field. She is currently the artistic director of the Viennale, the Vienna International Film Festival. Since 2021 she coordinates of the Film Curating Studies Department at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE), in San Sebastian, Spain.
Jean-Pierre Rehm (Algeria) Is a French film critic. He studied Modern Literature and Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. He has taught History and Theory of Art and Film, worked for the French Ministry of Culture and has been an exhibition curator and senior programmer for several institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo, the Yokohama Art Centre in Japan and Witte de With in Rotterdam. He has written regularly for several publications, including Cahiers du Cinéma and Trafic. From 2002 to 2021, he served as director of FIDMarseille, the Marseille International Documentary Film Festival.
Film factories: the invisible carving of contemporary cinema
The proliferation of laboratories within festivals is a phenomenon that is not entirely recent, but is becoming more and more universal. Every festival, after a while, institutes a lab and, if possible, also a market. What does this say about contemporary cinema? What is learnt in these spaces of inspiration and pre-production? Why do a vocabulary and a set of practices become established? When did the word pitching become a ubiquitous word in the mouths of filmmakers?
Available online from May 6th, 3 pm (CET)
Panellists: Adrian Martin, Manuel Asín and Mariano Llinás
Moderation: Roger Koza
Adrian Martin (Australia) is a film critic and audiovisual essayist based in Spain, and Adjunct Professor of Film and Screen Studies, Monash University (Australia). He is the author of nine books including Filmmakers Thinking (EQZE, 2022), Mysteries of Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018 & University of Western Australia Publishing, 2020) and Mise en scène and Film Style (Palgrave, 2014). An online archive covering over 40 years of his work is at http://www.filmcritic.com.au.
Manuel Asín (Spain) is a film programmer and researcher based in Madrid. He has programmed cycles for festivals, museums and institutions such as Filmoteca Española, Museo Reina Sofía, Instituto Moreira Salles, etc. He has published texts and interviews in magazines such as Trafic, Lumière and Caimán, where he is a member of the editorial board. He has edited the books Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Escritos and Hacer la revolución es también volver a colocar en su lugar cosas muy antiguas pero olvidadas. He directed the publishing house Intermedio (2011-2015). He is a member of the teaching staff of Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, Master LAV and SUR. He is currently artistic director of Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival, Navarra, and coordinator of the Círculo de Bellas Artes Department of Film in Madrid.
Mariano Llinás (Argentina) became known in the film world in 2002 with his first film, Balnearios, an ironic and unconventional documentary. A member of the ‘New Argentine Cinema’, Llinás achieved great success with Historias extraordinarias (2008), a four-hour film narrated by the Uruguayan actor Daniel Hendler, which won the recognition of Argentine critics and numerous awards, including the Special Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival (Bafici). In 2018 he released La flor, which, with a run time of fourteen hours (840 minutes divided into six episodes) became the third longest non-experimental film in history. Llinás is part of the filmmaking group El Pampero Cine, which operates outside the traditional financing structures of industrial cinema.
The Memory of the World: Archiving, Restoration and Dissemination in the Digital Era
An instant of time, an era, is condensed in any given sequence. The first film archives safeguarded the early periods of the moving image and that of the entire 20th century, as cinema quickly became a visual and sonic supplement to universal memory. But every archive (celluloid or digital) is also the history of cinema, and therefore constitutes a chronicle of the imagination, and of the evolution and transformation of mise-en-scène. Faced with this evident reality and with this responsibility, the dilemmas of today pose other challenges: is the digital archive sufficient to safeguard the analogue memory of the past? What is at risk when a film is digitised and “enhanced”? How should a film from the 20th century be screened? How can the exponential proliferation of the digital images of the present be archived? What criteria of selection should be implemented in the face of a visual universe that is impossible to archive in its entirety? Archives are not a thing of the past, but rather live in three juxtaposed tenses (past, present and future), and about this we must speak.
Available online from May 7th, 3 pm (CET)
Panellists: Haden Guest, Émilie Cauquy and Andrea Meneghelli
Moderation: Roger Koza
Haden Guest is Director of the Harvard Film Archive, whose year-round cinematheque he curates while also overseeing its ever-growing collection and active preservation program. He has curated film programs for festivals including the Viennale, Oberhausen, Mar del Plata as well as museums such as the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, and the Gulbenkian Foundation and Museum in Lisbon. As Senior Lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, he teaches courses on film history and archival practice.
Émilie Cauquy is in charge of the promotion of the Cinémathèque française’s film collections. She is in charge of the HENRI project, the institution’s VOD platform, as well as the online catalog of restorations. She regularly programs cycles, notably for Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna (Marie Epstein, Colette, Nicole Vedrès, Musidora), as well as spectacular screenings between projection, performance and theatrical reading (Germaine Dulac, Musidora, Georges Méliès).
Andrea Meneghelli is curator of the Film Collections at Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna. His work covers conservation, cataloging, digitization, collection enhancement through new acquisitions, restoration and international distribution of Cineteca’s films. He managed European initiatives devoted to the on-line diffusion of the audiovisual heritage, programmed retrospectives in film festivals, edited DVD collections devoted to Italian documentary cinema, wrote several essays and articles on film history and published various books, magazines, and periodicals. He is also member of the advisory board of the film festival Il Cinema Ritrovato.
Roger Koza is a Film Critic (Revista Ñ, La Voz del Interior; Con los ojos abiertos), programmer (Viennale; Filmfest Hamburg) and Artistic Director (Doc Buenos Aires; FICIC).
