Showing posts with label Eye for Film reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eye for Film reviews. Show all posts

Tuesday 17 November 2015

Preview: 53rd Festival Internacional de Cine de Gijón


My preview / overview of Gijón's line-up can be found at Eye for Film - here.

For further coverage during the festival, check out my new site (details in sidebar on the right).

Reviews of Spanish films screened in Gijón:


Friday 26 June 2015

EIFF: Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960)


    Overall at EIFF this year, my favourite screenings were the classics - I saw The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, 1974) and The Driver (Walter Hill, 1978). But Macario was the surprise of the festival for me. A magic realist fable set in the 18th century - but nonetheless feeling incredibly modern - Roberto Gavaldón's film is at times jaw-droppingly beautiful (courtesy of Gabriel Figueroa) but also sharp and humorous in its presentation of a simple woodcutter in a deal with Death. My review is now up at Eye for Film - here.
    David Cairns has written about Macario (herein his regular 'The Forgotten' column - like him, I'd like to see more of Gavaldón's films because on the basis of this one he merits further investigation.

    This is the last of my EIFF posts. I reviewed nine films for Eye for Film in total, four of which were Mexican films that I've already linked to on here, but among the remainder The Iron Ministry (viewable over at Doc Alliance), Precinct Seven Five (which I think is getting a UK release later in the summer) and Prophet's Prey are all interesting documentaries about very different subjects - the latter is quite harrowing viewing, but I'd watch the other two again (in fact it was my second viewing of The Iron Ministry). Normal service on the blog will resume shortly...

Tuesday 23 June 2015

EIFF: María Candelaria (Emilio Fernández, 1944)


My review of Mexican classic María Candelaria is now up over at Eye for Film (here). I was a bit disappointed by it - I'm not sure what I was expecting but I found the acting very stilted and film to be quite dated overall. The quality of the print also meant that Gabriel Figueroa's cinematography was not as impressive as it could have been (having seen clearer still images elsewhere) - although, as I've said in the review, there were still several standout compositions that made it worth seeing. Perhaps it's also just not my sort of film. But Edinburgh maintains its record of screening the best subtitle of the year so far: in this case, "[indistinct shouting]".

Monday 22 June 2015

EIFF: Llévate mis amores and Viento aparte


    The first of my reviews of films in the Focus on Mexico strand at EIFF 2015 have now gone online:

  • Llévate mis amores / All of Me (Arturo González Villaseñor, 2014) - a documentary about the tenacity of a group of women who, on a daily basis, attempt to feed the hundreds of migrants onboard the train known as "The Beast" as it passes through the village of La Patrona. Recommended. My review is here.
  • Viento aparte / A Separate Wind (Alejandro Gerber Bicecci, 2014) - a sibling road movie in which two adolescents have to make a 2,500 kilometre journey across Mexico on their own. My review is here.

Still to come in terms of my Eye for Film reviews are the two classics: María Candelaria (Emilio Fernández, 1944) and Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960). I will also be writing blog posts about two other Mexican films - 600 Millas / 600 Miles (Gabriel Ripstein, 2015) and La danza del hipocampo / The Dance of the Memory (Gabriela Domínguez Ruvalcaba, 2014).

Sunday 24 May 2015

Iberodocs, Glasgow: N-VI Vanishing Roads and Humano


    My reviews of two films showing at the 2nd weekend of the 2015 edition of Iberodocs are now online:

  • N-VI Vanishing Roads (Pela del Álamo, 2012) - a portrait of the abandoned N-VI road between Madrid and Galicia, presented through the people who still live alongside it. My review is here.
  • Humano (Alan Stivelman, 2013) - 25-year-old Alan sets off on an existential journey in the Andean mountains, searching for answers to fundamental questions about what it is to be human. My review is here.

Pela del Álamo's film continues the festival's 'Focus on Galicia' strand and looks at what happened to the communities alongside the N-VI road when it was superseded by the A-6 motorway. The film accumulates a sense of loss and isolation as it progresses but also captures the stubborn endurance of those people left on the wayside - it's well worth catching if you get the chance. Humano is not really my cup of tea as films go, but if you're more open to adventures in spiritual enlightenment than I am, you may find something of interest in director Alan Stivelman's Andean quest.

Friday 22 May 2015

Interview: Ion de Sosa and Chema García Ibarra

Sueñan los androides

    One slightly unexpected experience at D'A Festival was that I had the opportunity to interview people in person (I tried to interview someone at a film festival last year but wasn't insistent enough in following it up, and so the chance was lost). In this case, I had asked about the possibility of interviewing specific people before I headed to the festival but didn't find out whether or not I could until I arrived in Barcelona. The delay in me starting to write reviews while I was there was effectively the time I spent preparing questions (which had to wait until I had seen the relevant films as well).
    The first of these in-person interviews related to Sueñan los androides / Androids Dream and can be read over at Eye for Film - here. In fact, it was actually two interviews because I ended up interviewing director Ion de Sosa and co-writer Chema García Ibarra separately, but as I asked them the same questions - about Sueñan los androides and also Spanish cinema more generally - I've put their answers together in that piece. I will be returning to Sueñan los androides when I write something more detailed about the (Im)Possible Futures section - and I may expand that to be about Spanish sci-fi more generally, in which case I will also include Uranes (written and directed by Chema García Ibarra).
    Conducting interviews in person has been a learning experience, and one which will no doubt continue in the future. For example, in contrast to interviews conducted by email, I had the chance to respond to their answers with follow up questions, but in this instance I stuck to my original questions too rigidly. That was a confidence issue on my part given that we were speaking Spanish and it was the first time I'd ever interviewed anyone, in any language (yes, I decided to go for the full-blown baptism of fire). As I said to each of the people I interviewed in Barcelona (I still need to translate my interview with Crumbs director Miguel Llansó) - I can understand the majority of what is said to me in Spanish, but sometimes I can't find the right words when I want to express myself / respond. So that hindered me a bit - although they were all very patient when I did stray from the questions I had written down and had to grasp for the right words - but I think that I did the best I could, and I'm pleased that I went for it because I would have regretted it if I hadn't. Translating the interviews (I recorded them) has also been interesting from a language comprehension perspective because it's not enough to understand the gist if you're directly quoting someone (listening to myself speaking Spanish has also underlined that I should try to find some conversation classes again - I read or listen to Spanish on a daily basis but I don't have many opportunities to speak it), so I've had to work on both picking out their precise words (which is something I don't have to worry about when the interview is done via email because I receive the words in written form) and a more nuanced understanding of the specific words used.

Sunday 17 May 2015

Interview: Xurxo Chirro

Vikingland

    I contacted director Xurxo Chirro a couple of months ago when I was writing about 'Un impulso colectivo' and needed to track down a way of seeing Une histoire seule. So, when I realised that his film Vikingland (which I had already seen) was screening at Iberodocs, I contacted him again and asked whether he had the time to answer some questions about the film via email - he kindly agreed, and the resulting interview has been published over at Eye for Film (here).

    Where I've had the opportunity to interview directors in the past month, besides asking about the specific film they're promoting, I've also asked about 'el otro cine español' (obviously a topic of ongoing interest for me). In this case, I also asked about a more regional phenomenon - New Galician Cinema (Novo Cinema Galego). I've seen a number of films pertaining to this group but they were presented in isolation, so I don't know very much about the group collectively or how it came into being - i.e. why has there been this cinematic flourishing in the region. So the interview was enlightening for me in that context. But Xurxo's comment about 'el otro cine español' being like an archipelago with filmmakers either working alone or in smaller clusters (rather than a collective movement) also chimes with what I observed in Barcelona, and some of what filmmakers there said in response to similar questions on the general topic (in essence, I think there was another collective cluster detectable among certain films at the D'A Festival this year, in terms of filmmakers who are actively collaborating with each other and who share perspectives and cinematic attitudes). 
    As I've said on here before, I find the overall shape of 'el otro cine español' (as it is written about in Spanish publications) difficult to approach in an analytical way because the range of filmmakers included is broad and unwieldy. My method of breaking it down into a manageable starting point has been to concentrate on the documentaries, but I'm now wondering whether it might be more useful to identify a few of the concentrated clusters of filmmakers and use them as a starting point. I don't think this particularly contradicts what I've written so far on the subject; it is a refinement of my perspective and methods. But I will ponder this some more while I write up things from Barcelona - and I also have a specific topic I want to explore in relation to documentaries by filmmakers such as Víctor Moreno and Pablo Llorca, among others - so this won't be an immediate change in focus, but I may start to change my approach.

Iberodocs, Edinburgh: Arraianos and Vikingland


    The first of my reviews relating to Iberodocs have now gone online. Both films are part of the festival's 'Focus on Galicia' strand drawing attention to both the phenomenon of New Galician Cinema and a particular trend for documentary fictions.

  • Arraianos (Eloy Enciso, 2012) - a poetic portrait of the borderlands between Galicia and Portugal. My review is here.
  • Vikingland (Xurxo Chirro, 2011) - footage filmed by a Galician sailor who was working on a ferry between Germany and Denmark in the early 1990s is arranged to echo Melville's Moby Dick. My review is here.

Neither is a straightforwardly conventional film and would be rich texts to explore if you were considering issues of identity (personal, regional, and national), work, metaphysics, the natural world (and our place in it), and emigration - they have enough going on that I could write another review of each, focussed on entirely different elements. Both are worth seeking out if you get the opportunity. Arraianos is available on DVD (with optional English subtitles) directly from the people who made it - here.
    My other Iberodocs reviews will be of films screening in Glasgow, so I will write a separate post for them next weekend. I'll also write another post later today, to link to the interview I did with Xurxo Chirro.

Tuesday 12 May 2015

Iberodocs 2015


    My coverage of the D'A Festival is still ongoing (see my previous post), but the 2nd edition of Iberodocs starts this week in Scotland - it takes place in Edinburgh from this Thursday and moves to Glasgow the following weekend. I've written a preview for Eye for Film, which you can read here
    If you're able to go to either weekend, I can recommend Vikingland (dir. Xurxo Chirro), Arraianos (dir. Eloy Enciso), and La plaga / The Plague (dir. Neus Ballús) - plus, Arraianos is screening with Lois Patiño's short film Montaña en sombra, which I found breathtaking when I saw it in Bradford last year alongside Patiño's Costa da Morte (my favourite film last year, as if you need reminding). I'll be reviewing some of the films showing at Iberodocs over the coming fortnight, and I also have an interview with Xurxo Chirro about how Vikingland came to be and what New Galician Cinema is all about. I will post the links on here as and when they exist.

Interview: Adán Aliaga and David Valero


The first of my interviews relating to films I saw in Barcelona at the D'A Festival is now online. I interviewed Adán Aliaga and David Valero about their comedy El arca de Noé / Noah's Ark via email - you can read the result here.

Friday 8 May 2015

D'A Festival: short films

Avant pétalos grillados

    The D'A Festival had a varied programme of short films as part of the (Im)Possible Futures strand. I actually only saw one of them while I was in Barcelona (Chigger Ale played before the screening of Crumbs), but I've found quite a few of them online - Velasco Broca's films, including the three screened at the festival, are available to view for free on PLAT (his page on the site is here), Ángel Santos's Camiños de Bardaos is on YouTube, and Christelle Lheureux's La maladie blanche is available to rent on Vimeo. Only the last of those is available with English subtitles.
I've reviewed three of the shorts for Eye for Film:

  • Avant pétalos grillados (Velasco Broca, 2007) - an atmospheric and experimental sci-fi tale of alien invasion.
  • Chigger Ale (Fanta Ananas, 2013) - a precursor for Crumbs, this comic sci-fi tale sees a pint-sized Hitler go for a night out in Addis Ababa.
  • La maladie blanche (Christelle Lheureux, 2011) - a tale of enchantment in the Pyrenees.

Those conclude the reviews I'll be writing in relation to the D'A Festival. I'm still transcribing the interviews I did, and have more to write about the festival in general and (Im)Possible Futures in particular. I'm back at work next week, so my pace may slow down a bit.

Monday 4 May 2015

(Im)Possible Futures: Sueñan los androides, El arca de Noé, and Crumbs


The (Im)Possible Futures strand of the D'A Festival included six features and nine shorts. I am going to write something about the theme - I went to the festival's roundtable discussion on the subject - and the films as a collection, but in essence what they represent is 'low voltage' (or realist) sci-fi showing futures made plausible by their connections to our current realities. I'll be reviewing some of the shorts over the next few days, but these are my reviews of the three Spanish features in the section:

  • Sueñan los androides / Androids Dream (Ion de Sosa, 2014) - an experimental and dream-like take on Benidorm in 2052. My review is here. I interviewed Ion de Sosa and co-writer Chema García Ibarra (director of Uranes, which was part of last year's Un impulso colectivo strand) in Barcelona, so that interview should also appear later in the week (depending on how long it takes me to transcribe/translate Spanish).
  • El arca de Noé / Noah's Ark (Adán Aliaga and David Valero, 2014) - a sweet-natured comedy on inter-dimensional travel as a possible escape route from the economic crisis. My review is here.
  • Crumbs (Miguel Llansó, 2015) - a surreal quest across the epic Ethiopian landscape in search of Father Christmas and answers relating to a spaceship. It was my favourite film of the festival and my review is here. I also interviewed Miguel Llansó at the festival, and that should likewise appear later in the week (my transcribing/translation skills permitting).

I will create a separate post with links to the reviews of the short films once I've started writing them, and the same for the interviews. In the meantime, Eye for Film is now collating all of my coverage of D'A Festival on one page - here.

Obra, Favula, and more...


My reviews from D'A Festival are continuing to go up over at Eye for Film. The first handful are:

  • A misteriosa morte de Pérola / The Mysterious Death of Pérola (Guto Parente and Ticiana Augusto Lima, 2014), a Brazilian film that I almost walked out of - to find out why, read here.
  • Favula (Raúl Perrone, 2014), a genuine oddity and visual one-of-a-kind (review).
  • Obra (Gregorio Graziosi, 2014), another Brazilian film and one of my overall favourites of the festival - a visually and aurally distinctive film that I would like to see again. In the meantime, my review is here.

There are a couple more reviews already up, but because they're part of a group I'm waiting until they're all there before I link to them on here. I've got one more feature to review and then I'll take a look at a few of the shorts as well - the shorts were part of the (Im)Possible Futures strand, which I'm also going to write about as a collection.

Friday 1 May 2015

D'A Festival - Getting Started

El Incendio / The Fire (dir. Juan Schnitman)

    My first review from D'A Festival - of Argentinian drama El Incendio / The Fire (dir. Juan Schnitman) - has gone up over at Eye for Film (here). I'm a bit behind with the reviews but I had the opportunity to interview some of the filmmakers in attendance, so I've prioritised that in the last couple of days. Those interviews - with Ion de Sosa, Chema García Ibarra, and Miguel Llansó - will (probably) appear next week.
    This is my last day in Barcelona and I still have two more films to see, but reviews are forthcoming for: Obra (dir. Gregorio Graziosi), No todo es vigilia / Not All Is Vigil (dir. Hermes Paralluelo), El arca de Noé / Noah's Ark (dir. Adán Aliaga and David Valero), Sueñan los androides / Androids Dream (dir. Ion de Sosa), Favula (dir. Raúl Perrone), Crumbs (dir. Miguel Llansó), A misteriosa morte de Pérola / The Mysterious Death of Pérola (dir. Guto Parente and Ticiana Augusto Lima), Chorus (dir. François Delisle), and Queen of Earth (dir. Alex Ross Perry). Most of them will be at Eye for Film (unless they already have a review for the film in question) but I will put up links here. I'll also be writing about the festival in general, and will look specifically at the Spanish films in the (Im)Possible Futures section.

Sunday 12 April 2015

Preview: D'A Festival


    The fifth edition of D’A - Festival Internacional de Cine D'Autor de Barcelona (D'A Festival for short) starts in a couple of weeks and runs between 24th April and 3rd May. They announced their full programme on Friday, and I've written a preview piece over at Eye for Film - here
    I will be in Barcelona for five days during the festival. I had to book my flights a few weeks ago without knowing the full lineup or the actual schedule, so there are a couple of films that I'm disappointed to miss (namely Jonás Trueba's Los exiliados románticos / The Romantic Exiles (2015), although I'm fairly sure that will pop up over here at some point). But they've programmed a wide range of films that I've not seen before (both Spanish and otherwise - I'm looking forward to watching a Bulgarian film with subtitles in castellano) - and I'll also be checking out the listings for 'normal' cinemas too. 
    There will be stuff on the films I see - as well as the festival / Barcelona - appearing on here, and I'll also be writing reviews for Eye for Film. I'm not entirely sure how I'll set it out on here - it will probably depend on how much gets written while I'm actually there. To be continued...
UPDATE: There's now a handy PDF of the schedule available to download.

Sunday 8 March 2015

Os Fenómenos / Aces (Alfonso Zarauza, 2014)

Lola Dueñas and Miguel de Lira
    The Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival at the Cornerhouse in Manchester has had a change of format this year - instead of its usual two weeks in March, they're doing three 'weekenders' throughout the year. I'm hoping that this is simply because they're currently in the process of moving building, and not a permanent change. This weekend has been the first one (programme), the next will be in June with a focus on Mexican cinema (given that this coincides with the Edinburgh Film Festival - and this year they're taking Mexico as their main country focus - I presume that there will be an overlap with the films screening in Edinburgh), and third will be at some point in the autumn. 
    The range of films and times of day they were shown for this first weekend meant that it wasn't worth me travelling down to Manchester, but I have reviewed Os Fenómenos / Aces (Alfonso Zarauza, 2014) - the only Spanish film in the line-up that I had been looking out for - for Eye for Film (here).

Thursday 13 November 2014

Sobre la marxa / The Creator of the Jungle (Jordi Morató, 2014)


My review of Sobre la marxa - as seen at the Leeds International Film Festival last weekend - is up over at Eye for Film, here. I'll return to the film on here when I start pulling together my thoughts on the various Spanish documentaries I've been watching in the last few months.

Friday 7 November 2014

Luis García Berlanga (1921 - 2010) and Juan Antonio Bardem (1922 - 2002)

Luis García Berlanga front left and Juan Antonio Bardem centre, on the set of Esa pareja feliz. Picture taken from the Berlanga Film Museum website
"[Spanish cinema] is politically ineffectual, socially false, intellectually poverty-stricken, aesthetically-void and industrially stunted" - Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955
"Berlanga is not a Communist, he is something much worse: he is a bad Spaniard" - Francisco Franco, allegedly (quoted in Marsh 2006: 122)  
   The 28th Leeds International Film Festival is currently offering a joint retrospective of the two directors - who trained at film school together - concentrating on the early stages of their careers (effectively their key films made during the dictatorship) but also including a few films made by later generations of directors who can be said to have cinematic links to Berlanga and Bardem - Víctor Erice's El espíritu de la colmena (1973), Carlos Saura's Cría cuervos (1976), and Pedro Almodóvar's Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (1984).
   Although he co-scripted Bienvenido Mr Marshall!, arguably Bardem is somewhat shortchanged by the selection of films - the absence of Calle Mayor / Main Street (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1956) seems a glaring omission. Perhaps Berlanga's films from the period have better withstood the passing of time, their sharpness not dulled one iota (I say this having seen very few of Bardem's films). But Bardem's public criticisms of the cinema made in Spain - and his political commitment (which saw him jailed during the dictatorship - he was a member of the Communist party) - are addressed and / or echoed in the form and content of films made by Erice and Saura. The surprise is perhaps how much Berlanga and Bardem got past the censors - although their films were censored, they still seem pretty blunt in their criticisms of the regime and the Establishment - although maybe the metaphorical style of Erice and Saura (with which I'm more familiar) was a case of filmmakers learning from the postwar generation and cloaking their critique in a layer of opacity (although they still had their fair share of battles with State censorship). 
   Another connection across the years is Fernando Fernán Gómez, represented here as an actor in Berlanga and Bardem's joint directorial debut Esa pareja feliz (made in 1951 but not released until 1953) and El espíritu de la colmena, but he also worked with Saura (Ana y los lobos / Ana and the Wolves (1973), Mama cumplé 100 años / Mama Turns 100 (1979), and Los zancos / The Stiltwalkers (1984)) and Almodóvar (Todo sobre mi madre / All About My Mother (1999)). He is little known beyond the Erice film in the UK, but he was a colossus of Spanish cinema (he died in 2007) with a long and varied career both in front of and behind the camera (he had 212 credits as an actor and 30 as a director (the majority of which were also written by him)) - should I ever finish the Carlos Saura Challenge (hahaha...), I wouldn't mind investigating the films he directed.
   Although his films satirise social issues and regularly skewer the Establishment (both during and after the dictatorship), Berlanga had a more complicated political background than Bardem - Berlanga's father was a Republican who was jailed after the Civil War, at which juncture the future director joined the División Azul (a volunteer regiment sent by Franco to fight alongside the Germans on the Russian Front during World War Two), but he would later officially become 'an enemy of the regime' after the gathering known as the Salamanca Conversations in 1955 (the occasion of Bardem's infamous statement at the top of this post).
   Almodóvar's films more obviously connect with those of Berlanga (although Bardem repeatedly returned to Almodóvar's favoured genre of melodrama) - while Berlanga's work often depicts a realistic social milieu, the humour taps in to Spanish traditions of costumbrismo (effectively a series of stereotypes relating to the rural and working classes, not to be taken as realistic, which took on an ironic edge from the 1950s) and esperpento (in which a distorted version of reality is utilised in order to critique it), which can also be discerned in some of the films by the man from La Mancha (and also those of the other Spanish director who has a retrospective at Leeds - Álex de la Iglesia (who I will write about next week)).
   Both Berlanga and Bardem had long careers - the former directed his last feature in 1999, the latter in 1998 - so there are plenty more of their films to explore if the retrospective piques your interest.

I will add links to the respective reviews of the films listed below as and when they go online.

Monday 3 November 2014

Preview: Spanish cinema at the 28th Leeds International Film Festival

El verdugo / The Executioner (Luis García Berlanga, 1964)
   The 28th Leeds International Film Festival begins this week, running between 5th - 20th November, and an unusually high number of Spanish films are screening there.
   As I mentioned in my previous post, Sobre la marxa / The Creator of the Jungle (Jordi Morató, 2014) will be showing, but there are also two Spanish retrospectives: one combining the early films of Luis García Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem with a few of their cinematic descendants (with films by Víctor Erice, Carlos Saura, and Pedro Almodóvar), and the other featuring the mayhem of Álex de la Iglesia (playing as part of the Fanomenon strand). Full details of screening times for all of the Spanish films can be found here.
   I'll be reviewing the Spanish films - and others - for Eye for Film and Take One. My intention is to put up a post here for each of the two retrospectives with a brief overview and collate the links to the relevant reviews. Sobre la marxa will get its own post because it fits with my current documentary focus, and the screening of Cría cuervos / Raise Ravens means that the Carlos Saura Challenge will restart (as I'll be reviewing the film as well, that extended post may not appear until the week after the festival).