Valdivia, May 30, 2024. The Tributes section includes focus retrospectives devoted to Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián, to American director Sara Kathryn Arledge, to the Palestine Film Unit, and to the Cooperativa Cine Marginal, along with the screening of Our Voice of Earth, Memory and Future, a film co-directed by Colombian authors Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, which this year celebrates five decades since its conception.
Meanwhile, the Central Film will be A Fidai Film, the latest documentary by Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari.
Recovering Palestinian memory
A Fidai Film, the new work by Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari (Ramla, 1972), deepens his research project into the memory of his nation. He has built his -mostly documentary- body of work with the recovery of his people’s audiovisual archive, images organized out of everyday life, which function as testimony of identity and also of historical persistence. With this perspective, he has authored such films as Port of Memory (2010) and Paradiso, XXXI, 108 (2022).
Along the lines of these earlier works, the arrangement of the records here included – which span almost the entire 20th century – is organized in part at random, where the instability and fleetingness of their textures reinforce their constitutive fragility, which is amplified with the digital interventions Aljafari makes in them.
A Fidai Film focuses on the recovery of the audiovisual and photographic archive of the Palestinian Research Center in Beirut, which was looted by Israeli troops in 1982, in the context of the Lebanese War, and then transferred to the archives of the Israeli Army and the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
A small part of this material – the volume and historical scope of which has not yet been fully determined – has been released since 2010, under internal pressure from Israeli academics. It is with some of these images that Kamal Aljafari elaborates a reflection on the collective memory, identity, and fleetingness of records. A Fidai Film premiered last April at Visions du Réel 2024 and won the jury prize in the Burning Lights section. Its Latin American premiere will be as the Central Film of the 31st FICValdvia.
Central Film:
A Fidai Film, by Kamal Aljafari. Palestine, Germany, Qatar, Brazil, France. 2024. 78 minutes.
TRIBUTES
In 2018, FICValdivia paid homage to Colombian filmmaker Marta Rodríguez, a pioneer of Latin American documentary, with a screening of her film Chircales (1966-1971), which she made together with her partner, Jorge Silva, and which captures the daily environment of a family that manufactures bricks in the southern periphery of Bogotá.
The festival maintained ties with the director in 2021, organizing a panel conversation that stemmed from the free online showing, during the pandemic, of her work Planas, the testimony of an ethnocide, which that year commemorated its 50th anniversary.
This year, one of her most important pieces, Our Voice of Earth, Memory and Future, also co-directed with Silva, commemorates five decades since its conception, and will be part of the Tributes section.
Filmed in 1974, the movie aimed to eloquently depict the identity and neglect of the Coconuco indigenous community, in Cauca, Colombia, based on a chronicle of great symbolic power, which describes how this people have internalized the cycle of cultural usurpation and its violent dispossession, since the arrival of the Spaniards. With a voice-over story that synthesizes into a continuum of countless voices the point of view of this indigenous people, the documentary combines their original worldview with the historical narrative and the experiences of violence accrued over the years.
It is this last aspect that provides the story with a political urgency, accounting for the poverty and economic precariousness that derives from the incontrovertible power of landowners. From there, the film advocates the restoration of indigenous rights, the demand for a dignified existence, and the defense of their culture, language, and traditions.
50 YEARS’ TRIBUTE
Our Voice of Earth, Memory and Future, Marta Rodriguez and Jorge Silva. Colombia. 1974-1981. 90 minutes.
Nicolás Guillen Landrián: A Legend Rescued
In the progression of Cuban cinema, the name Nicolás Guillen Landrián (1938-2003) alludes to dissent and exile, and to a tense existence between his rise as a documentary filmmaker and the deliberate invisibility of his exuberant work, confined in the cellars of the ICAIC for decades, something that was only recently reversed by the ICAIC itself.
Born in the town of Camagüey -like his uncle, the celebrated poet Nicolas Guillén-, he developed throughout the 1960s and early 1970s an exceptional body of work, based on an approach to documentary filmmaking marked by the will to investigate, transforming the conventional format of the cinematic newscast into an experimental and anthropological search, one that is closer to the film essay genre.
His creative work on the island concentrated between 1962 and 1972, during which time he produced works of great plastic beauty and rhythmic sense. Due to their avant-garde character, and a reticence regarding the institutional order imposed from Havana, the score of films Guillen Landrián directed became aesthetically and politically awkward, and his figure was deemed dangerous. In the mid-1970s, he was sent to hard labor for his misalignment with the principles of the Revolution. He was imprisoned more than once and was even subjected to electroshock therapy at psychiatric hospitals.
His films were banned, locked away, poorly preserved, and their recovery, authorized by ICAIC, has been a slow and laborious task. Some of his production will feature in the FICValdivia tributes, in its 2024 edition.
Homage to Nicolás Guillén Landrián:
En un Barrio Viejo (Cuba, 1963, 9 minutes)
Los del Baile (Cuba, 1965, 6 minutes)
Ociel del Toa (Cuba, 1965, 17 minutes)
Coffea Arabica (Cuba, 1968, 18 minutes)
Taller de Línea y 18 (Cuba, 1971, 15 minutes)
Para Construir una Casa (Cuba, 1972, 17 minutes)
Sara Kathryn Arledge, a forerunner of American experimental cinema
Within the framework of audiovisual creation that runs parallel to American industrial development, Sara Kathryn Arledge (1911-1998) is considered a precursor of what would become independent cinema, and which would take on a more solid form and sense beginning in 1960. Coming from the visual arts tradition, a discipline in which she trained towards the end of the 1930s, Arledge became interested in the possibilities of audiovisual expression, even before the iconic Maya Deren (1917-1961) began her initial experimental works.
Arledge made six short films between 1941 and 1983. Each explored different ways of approaching form, partly guided by its relationship to materiality. However, none of these films were widely disseminated, and she even suffered the consequences of her misunderstood sensibilities, being committed against her will, and treated with electroshock. On this experience, she wrote the following text, translated by the film magazine Lumière:
“Stunned by the first treatment, I managed to walk to the bedroom, where I kept painting. I would paint every afternoon. I was finishing a huge abstract watercolor with a black background. I was so confused with the treatment that I fell into bed. But I still had enough memory to be clear that this treatment would not interfere with my painting, no matter how brutal it was. The will to paint was the only thing left of my life. It was an escape from life in the ward. Painting, I could turn my back on the censorship in the letters; the terrible tinkling of the keys of the tecs at the door, locking us in front of the rest of the world like animals at a zoo; that entire humiliating process of cattle-like regimentation we all suffered; the thieves who took advantage of our confusion to steal our clothes; and the ubiquitous contact with very sick patients.”
Sara Kathryn Arledge’s pioneering work will be part of the Tributes section of the 31st FICValdivia, screening in their original 16mm format.
Tribute to Sara Kathryn Arledge:
Introspection (United States, 1941, 7 minutes)
What is a Man (United States, 1958, 10 minutes)
Tender Images (United States, 1978, 6 minutes)
Interior Garden (United States, 1978, 7 minutes)
What Do Two Rights Make? (United States, 1983, 15 minutes)
Images of Palestinian Resistance
Also part of the Tributes section will be the focus on the Palestine Film Unit (PFU), a collective launched in 1968 by Mustafa Abu Ali, Hani Jawhariyya, Khadijeh Habashneh, and Sulafa Jadallah. This group of filmmakers affiliated with the resistance in Jordan, as part of the Palestinian army’s first triumphs against Israel, since the Six-Day War.
In this context, the collective aligned itself with Al-Fatah, one of the factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which dealt with clandestine coordination in the recently occupied territories, to give confidence to the population about the prospects for their liberation. From there, they focused on providing the revolutionary process with a cinematic language, from its record and the awareness of its self-image, showing their films in refugee camps. Thus, they contributed to the struggle to raise awareness about the defense of their nation, with a body of work that would become the basis for the creation, in the mid-1970s, of the Palestinian Film Institute.
Her work in the service of the Palestinian cause meant that Sulafa Jadallah, the first woman director in Arab cinema, was hit by a bullet while filming, which almost cost her her life and made it impossible for her to continue working in the audiovisual field. Hani Jawhariyya was also shot and killed while filming, becoming the first martyr of Palestinian cinema, which is depicted in the documentary Palestine in the Eye.
A selection of the group’s work will be part of the Tributes section of the 31st FICVAldivia, conducted in conjunction with Khadijeh Habashneh, founder of the Palestine Film Unit, coordinator of the Old Palestinian Films Preservation Project, to preserve and recover the Palestinian film archive, and author of the book Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestine Film Unit (2023).
Tribute to the Palestine Film Unit:
Scenes from Occupation in Gaza, by Mustafa Abu Ali (Palestine, 1973, 13 minutes)
They Do Not Exist, by Mustafa Abu Ali (Palestine, 1974, 25 minutes)
Palestine in the Eye, by Mustafa Abu Ali (Palestine, 1976, 28 minutes)
Palestinian Visions, by Adnan Madanat (Palestine, 1977, 30 minutes)
Children without Childhood, by Khadijeh Habashneh (Palestine, 1979-1980, 21 minutes)
The Flags of the People, towards a Mexican working class cinema
Formed around the second half of 1971 with the aim of supporting the strengthening of workers’ organizations in Mexico, the Cooperativa Cine Marginal (Marginal Film Cooperative) originated as a way of articulating between student militant vocation and proletarian activity.
In this position, the Cooperative mostly favored a proclamation-style cinema – the so-called Communiqués of Workers’ Insurgency – which consisted of brief narratives made to disseminate the experiences of workers throughout the country, and thus strengthen solidarity among them. Out of this, they coordinated a real alternative production and exhibition network, where the workers themselves became involved in making movies that, unlike the militant Latin American cinema of the period, were characterized by pictures made in the Super 8mm home format, instead of the usual 16mm.
It was their own class consciousness that led the Cooperative to dissolve in order to integrate definitively into the workers’ struggle, no longer from audiovisual practice but as workers.
The relentless dissemination of these audiovisual pieces and their Super 8mm format led much of the Cooperative production to irretrievable deterioration. For this reason, out of the large body of work they made, only a dozen have remained to this day, a vestige of the Cooperative’s production, preserved in different states at the UNAM Film Library, many of them without sound. However, their value as a historical testimony of the Mexican workers’ struggles encourages us to recover and honor them in this 31st FICValdivia 2024.
Tribute to Cooperativa Cine Marginal:
Comunicado de insurgencia obrera Nº 1 (Mexico, 1971, 12 minutes)
Comunicado de insurgencia obrera Nº 2 (Mexico, 1972, 12 minutes)
Comunicado de insurgencia obrera Nº 3 (Mexico, 1972, 15 minutes)
Otro país (Mexico, 1972, 14 minutes)
Nosotros Sì Existimos (Mexico, 1972, 20 minutes)
Huelga del sindicato de Nissan (Mexico, 1973, 19 minutes)
Basta! La marcha campesina (Mexico, 1973, 30 minutes)
The Valdivia International Film Festival (FICValdivia) will take place this year from October 14 to 20. FICValdivia was founded and is organized by Universidad Austral de Chile; it is produced by the Valdivia Cultural Center for Film Promotion; convened by the Great City of Valdivia, the Los Ríos Regional Government, and Codeproval; financed by the Audiovisual Fund, the Collaborating Festivals Program of the Audiovisual Arts and Industry Council, and the Support Program for Collaborating Cultural Organizations of the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage.
