Gala is one of the most anticipated sections in each version of the Valdivia International Film Festival, which this year – in the framework of its 30th anniversary – mostly convenes filmmakers who have been present at previous editions.
Radu Jude, Angela Schanelec, and the posthumous legacy of Jean-Luc Godard
Romanian director Radu Jude, who screened Uppercase Print in FICValdivia 27 and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn at its 29th edition, will also be present at this commemorative version of the Festival with his new feature Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World, which focuses again on those characters crushed by the alienating bureaucratic and corporate machineries. The picture, which just had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival, is divided into two parts. The first focuses on a production assistant in charge of coordinating the casting recordings for an institutional video about workplace accidents, at a multinational company. The second segment takes on the actress chosen for the role, a paraplegic woman, who reveals in the selection process that the accident that left her in that state was due to the company’s own negligence. With this deeply moral satire, Radu Jude shines a light on the relativity of corporate ethics, as the woman’s revelation forces the story to be altered to suit the company’s interests.
Also returning to the Gala program is Angela Schanelec, a German filmmaker of very careful psychological portraits, whose I Was at Home, But screened during the Festival’s 26th edition. Her new feature, Music, is a more complex exercise than her previous work, firstly because its temporality evolves around the 1970s, the 2000s, and the present day, to give an account – from scraps and with a persistently elliptical construction – of the existential itinerary of a young man that accidentally kills a stranger in a fortuitous fight. It is also complex because it is a volatile and fascinating story that follows the rhythm and cadence of the baroque music that makes up much of its soundtrack and which, evidently, explains the movie’s title. Music is very much an emotional experience, an austere and modest approach to lives marked by something that seems to be an itinerary predefined by destiny.
Film Annonce Du Film Qui N’existera Jamais: “Drôles De Guerres”, by Jean-Luc Godard.
Jean-Luc Godard’s death, on September 13 last year, seems not to have completely stopped the process of his work. Film Annonce Du Film Qui N’existera Jamais: Drôles De Guerres is the last picture he managed to complete and, strictly speaking, it is a record of the preparation for a previous film -Drôles de Guerres- which he never shot in the end. What is fascinating about this posthumous rescue has to do precisely with the act of transforming a frustrated and unfinished process into a piece, this rough draft of a film that never existed and that this new motion picture stages from the pages, with sketches and ideas about that embryonic movie.
A film about another movie has not been rare in Godard’s oeuvre. He carried out similar exercises with Petites Notes À Propos Du Film “Je Vous Salue, Marie” (1983), Scénario Du Film “Passion” (1982), and before that, with Quelques Remarques Sur La Réalisation Et La Production Du Film “Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie)” (1979), but what is exciting is the possibility of feeling the director’s lucidity, his voice, and his reflections on images and sound alive once again.
Coming back: Wenders and Kaurismäki
Since the release of The Other Side of Hope (2017), Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki remained dangerously inactive. He even hinted on more than one occasion, along with his scathing criticisms of the state of cinema, that he was leaving the profession. In the meantime, in 2021, he decided to open a movie theater, not in Helsinki, where he used to set his films, but in Karkkila, a small town of just over 8,000 inhabitants. This gesture, which can also be understood as Kaurismäki’s attempt at resistance in the midst of the onslaught of American cinema in most of the world’s cinema houses, is ratified by his long-awaited return to directing with Fallen Leaves. His new feature tells the story of two characters, Ansa and Holappa, and their precarious existences, shaped by minimal jobs and their limited ability to relate to their surroundings. It is this very precariousness that makes them meet and start a relationship. As is usual in his cinema, the picture delves deep into that precariousness to find his characters’ redemption there. His work has always been on the side of the dispossessed and those alienated from the system.
The Gala section has also included Germany’s Wim Wenders, a pillar of the New German Cinema and perhaps the most American of his country’s filmmakers. In 1985, Wenders made a beautiful homage to the aesthetics of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, in Tokyo Ga, and now, he returns to that city almost forty years later, to set his new full-length picture there.
Perfect Days narrates the routine of Hirayama, a man who makes his living cleaning toilets. His life is spent in the routine of commuting from one place to another, where he listens to music from the 70s and 80s on an old cassette player, and also in his apartment, where he concentrates on reading the classics. In a style that is very close to Jarmusch’s, with an emphasis on the repetitive actions of his daily life, the movie organizes in four narrative arcs, orchestrated around the encounters the character has in the midst of his structured routine, in which his nature and his silent way of being grateful for the life he leads slowly unfolds.
Reuniting with Damien Manivel, Martín Rejtman, and Pedro Costa
Damien Manivel’s two latest feature films – Les Enfants d’Isadora (2019) and Magdala (2022) – screened in this section, during past editions of FICValdivia. Both are, evidently and although in almost opposite styles, reflections on dance and the body. His new film, L’Ile, veers from the style of the two previous productions to focus on Rosa, a teenager living her last summer day on a beach in Brittany, with a group of friends, before leaving for Montreal, in a seemingly irreversible life change.
That slight emotional border between her former existence and her imminent future is the dramatic space from which the director amplifies his inquiries about cinema and dance. In L’Ile, Damien Manivel crosses the story with footage of rehearsal sessions with his actors, interspersing beach locations with the empty, stylized spaces where the same group of performers rehearses. In this fascinating split between the sketch and the final version, between search and discovery, the omnivorous nature of cinema is emphasized, one where everything can be taken, exposed, and reconverted, to account for the inexhaustible nooks and crannies of every creative process.
The strangeness and perplexity with which Argentine director Martín Rejtman has filmed everyday life in his country is probably the most recognizable aspect in his style. The daily tragedy of his small characters seems to disrupt their anonymous existences to the point of, paradoxically, granting them a degree of heroism and redemption.
In La Práctica, his new feature, Rejtman brings his vision of everyday hell to Santiago, on the basis of depicting the crisis between Gustavo and Vanesa, a couple of yoga teachers that have begun a process of separation, which ruins all their immediate plans.
The breakup also leaves Gustavo, an Argentinean man living in Chile, without a place to live, and from that point, the film is structured to portray the chaos the protagonist must face. In La Práctica there is a succession of strange characters and absurd situations, traced with the sober temper Rejtman employs to approach his stories and which amplifies the humor and substance in his work.
After the unsurpassable Cavalho Dineiro (FICValdivia 21) and Vitalina Varela (FICValdivia 26), Portugal’s Pedro Costa continues his political forays into marginality with As Filhas do Fogo, a short film that tells the story of three young sisters who have been separated by the eruption of a volcano in Cape Verde. Costa constructs this story of family fractures with the collaboration of three singers -Elizabeth Pinard, Alice Costa, and Karyna Gomes- in the leading roles, and uses material that he recorded himself for the shooting of Casa de Lava, in 1994.
Un Pincement au Coeur, Guillaume Brac
Guillaume Brac was the subject of a complete focus, during the 27th edition of FICValdivia. This experience is now complete, incorporating in this program his recent motion picture, Un Pincement au Coeur, which expands his very tight sense of observing customs, where the summer season plays a relevant dramatic role.
In this case, it is the story of two teenage friends who, at the end of the school year, become aware that this will be the last time they will be together, as Linda will have to move. The movie follows along similar terrain as did his previous films, All Hands on Deck and July Tales: Guillaume Brac builds his story of learning and emotional breakdowns with his usual capacity for observation, to capture behavioral traits, along with non-verbal details, and his two protagonists’ formidable work of expressive spontaneity.
Young filmmakers: Vadim Kostrov and Alice Rohrwacher
La Chimera, the new title by Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, relapses into the kind of enigmatic and endearing characters as did her highly successful Lazzaro Felice, in 2018. In her new film, it is Arthur, a melancholy young man who has just been released from prison and who returns to his small village in Tuscany, to reconnect with family and friends. However, upon arrival, he avoids his former group, who are involved in trafficking archaeological remains. Rohrwacher’s direction keeps to an elliptical and surprising tone, avoiding giving too much information, in order to dole it out, even at the wrong time. But what organizes the story is the plethora of quirky supporting characters, Arthur’s attempts to cure the illness that apparently keeps him immersed in sadness, and his attempts to engage a young singing student.
It is probably the youth and prolific activity of Russian filmmaker Vadim Kostrov that initially generated interest in his work, in the international cinephilia. Beyond these considerations, the most relevant thing has been his visual capacity, consigned in diverse formats in which, in principle, Kostrov has opted to observe certain counter-cultural activities, as was the case of his first work, Loft-Underground (2019), and in his Narodnaya Trilogy –Narodnaya (2019), After Narodnaya (2021), and Comet (2021)- which were musical experiences of observation built on the basis of documentary filmmaking. This formal dimension contrasts with movies such as Orpheus (2020), Summer (2021), and Winter (2021), in which the director delves into completely opposite narrative rhythms, with a dramaturgy that is attentive to gestures and minimal emotions. In any case, his productions have in common a very marked generational accent and the nods the Kostrov makes to evince the nature of cinematographic record (or artifice, if you will).
Of his extensive work, Summer premiered in the official feature section, at the 28th edition of FICValdivia, so the inclusion of his new film, Still Free, broadens and gives perspective to the dissemination of his oeuvre.
Still Free is a medium-length that explores – with the same subtle traits of Orpheus, Summer, and Winter – two days in the relationship of a young couple who spend part of the summer in the vicinity of the Zeya River. The emotional character of the moments Kostrov chooses to show, out of those two days, is contrasted by a kind of uncertainty about her university future and the possibility of his joining the army.
