Matilde Landeta entered the flourishing Mexican film industry in the 1930s, working her way up from script girl to direct 110 shorts and, in the late 40s, to produce and direct three features, including LA NEGRA ANGUSTIAS. In this engrossing documentary filmed in Mexico City, a vibrant Landeta, now in her 70s, recalls those years. Interviews with Mexican directors Marcela Fernandez-Violante and Maria Novaro enrich this illuminating tribute.
Category: Short
During a film course lead by Yvette Biró at the Hungarian Academy of Drama and film in 1995, the director students were shown a black-and-white photo taken by Lucien Herve in 1952, and they were given the task of writing a short film based on it. Three women are standing at the outskirts of a village, looking out of the picture in the same direction. This six-minute one-shot film shows what the Herve photo does not.
A drama about a group of people stranded at an old wartime guesthouse during a flood. One guest announces that he has the power to “decreate” people and is asked to demonstrate. From an original story by Harry Farjeon.
Ritualised through performance to camera, Stages of Mourning is Pucill’s journey of bereavement. In as much as this is a meditation on coming to terms with loss, the film is an exploration of how our relationship with the dead is made different through film. The artist orders image fragments of her late lover and collaborator, Sandra Lahire. By trying to physically immerse herself into photographs and film footage or by restaging these, Pucill forms a continuous stream of a life of two lovers. Through this doubling and layering, illusions accumulate as if these were a product of a machine that didn’t stop.
For forty years Alejandro Farfán has been making and showing films in El Pedregal. Now located in the heart of Caracas, this community was a small village when Alejandro first went to the cinema. This is a portrait of a local film-maker and of El Pedregal itself, exploring the place and its memories.
An adaptation of the renowned Portuguese Letters, originally written in French and attributed to Soror Mariana Alcoforado. As letters may have been written by Soror, in the Convent of Nossa Senhora da Conceição in Beja, to her lover Noel Bouton, Count of Chamilly.
A lyrical and yet at the same time passionate ‘situation report’ on the living conditions of Hungarian Gypsies. With this, his first significant work, Sándor Sára, who went on to become one of the most influential figures in Hungarian film as both cinematographer and director, aimed not only to document but also to take a standpoint on this critical topic. The exposition of the film determines the context: newspaper articles and socio-photos reporting on the plight of the Roma, listing numbers and statistics, and in the follow-on Sára depicts the problem through motion pictures.
This exquisite Soviet animated adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale tells the story of a water-dwelling maiden, Rusalochka, who trades her voice for legs after falling in love with a human prince. The story transitions between the black and white human world of Copenhagen, where tourists believe in love but not in mermaids, and the gorgeously vibrant visuals of the underwater mermaid kingdom, accompanied by Aleksandr Lokshin’s haunting music.