- In its section Chilean Cinema Tributes, FICValdivia brings us an unprecedented showcase in Chile, to highlight the work of Armando Rojas Castro and Jaime Barrios.
- The tributes with live musicalization will center on the centennial of the Soviet film Aelita, by Yakov Protazanov, on the work of American filmmaker and actress Mabel Normand, and on the joint work of director Dimitri Kirsanoff and actress Nadia Sibirskaïa.
- Four focus programs have been scheduled this year on filmmakers Cecilia Bartolomé, André Novais Oliveira, Messaline Raverdy, and Elena Duque.
Valdivia, July 25. As part of the announcements for its 2024 program, FICValdivia presents its remarkable sections Chilean Cinema Tributes, Live Music Tributes, and the always anticipated Filmmakers in Focus.
Chilean Cinema Tributes
This year FICValdivia inaugurates a new space in its Tributes section, dedicated entirely to Chilean filmmaking.
To this end, it has programmed a focus on Armando Rojas Castro (1896-1968), one of the pioneers of documentary in Chile, who glimpsed in this genre a direct path toward the population’s education and culture, partly as a result of his teaching work at the School of Arts and Trades, in Santiago.
His didactic vocation for cinema began in 1920 with Uno de Abajo, his first feature film, which warns of the dangers of alcoholism, and that prompted him to travel to Germany, to learn firsthand about the productive work of the UFA, and to teach Spanish at the University of Berlin. His second documentary emerged from this experience, the short film Lo que Vi en Alemania (1926), after which he returned to Chile in 1929, to establish the first film institution linked to teaching cinema as a tool, the Universidad de Chile Institute of Educational Cinematography, from where he redirected his creative work in nonfiction movies. Later, towards the beginning of the forties, he also joined the newly minted Chile Films as a technical adviser, representing Universidad de Chile, a position he soon left due to management discrepancies. He created the newscast DIC, under the auspices of the Directorate of Information and Culture of the Presidency of the Republic, which allowed him to keep a systematic record of current events, without ever abandoning independent documentary production.
The selection of works for this tribute to Rojas Castro’s filmography, which FICValdivia organized together with the Universidad de Chile Film Archive, focuses in part on that fruitful period between doing cinematographic work for the University and for the Presidency. It includes the shorts Santiago, also known as El Corazon de un Nación, made in 1933, and 1944’s La Tirana, along with extracts from the newscast Chile al Día, thanks to a collaboration with the Colchagua Museum Film Archive.
Also screening will be Antártida Chilena (1947) and El Presidente de Chile en la Antártica (1948), whose original negatives were repatriated from Mexico by FICValdivia to allow the Universidad de Chile Film Archive to restore and digitize them. Antártida Chilena meticulously captures the first Chilean expedition to the South Pole, which gathered scientists, politicians, and writers, earlier that year.
Along with the spotlight to rediscover Rojas Castro’s filmography, the Festival has highlighted the figure of Jaime Barrios (1945-1989), an artist trained as a filmmaker in New York, where he arrived at 18, in 1963, after leaving Chile, following a car accident that had kept him prostrate for months.
Barrios joined the growing scene of the cinematic avant-garde organized on the Lower East Side of New York City, hatching out of New York’s expanded cinema and the happenings that Jonas Mekas recorded extensively, in his texts for Film Culture magazine. From here, the Chilean artist participated in street film collectives and made a handful of pictures towards the end of the sixties, holding in them to the vocation of what Mekas had called “spontaneous cinema.” From his production, FICValdivia will show Homenaje a Nicanor Parra (1968), an iconic and almost cursed 44-minute picture, which Barrios shot during the poet’s visit to New York, and which premiered fleetingly in Santiago that year – at the Universidad de Chile Film Archive, at the Las Condes Municipal Theater, and at the Czech Culture Center, according to press reports. The movie was shot in part at the residence of painter Nemesio Antúnez in Manhattan, while he served as cultural attaché; it is constructed from an interview with Parra by Venezuelan dancer Rolando Peña, which abruptly converges with a psychedelic party.
Shortly before that piece, Barrios made Film Club (1968), a 26-minute short that directly captures the activities of the Young Filmmakers Foundation (YFF), a collective which included Barrios himself, dedicated to teaching cinema to Puerto Rican teenagers in New York’s Lower East Side.
The third film in this homage is This is Not a Demonstration (1969). The 8-minute short covers a day in the activities of the Guerrilla Theater, a group created by Colombian playwright Enrique Vargas, whose street performances were aimed primarily at Latino immigrants in New York, during the mid-sixties.
It is important to note that, in 2018, the online film magazine laFuga dedicated a complete dossier to the Jaime Barrios’ work, highlighting his figure. This series gives continuity and complement to that initial step, screening his work in its original 16mm format.
Tributes Set to Live Music
The musicalized tributes in this edition will focus on the centennial of the Soviet film Aelita, by Yakov Protazanov, on the work of the American comedic actress Mabel Normand, and on the work by filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanoff with actress Nadia Sibirskaïa.
During the first two decades of cinema history, Mabel Normand (1892-1930) rose quickly as one of the first comedic actresses in Mack Sennett’s milieu, in parallel with up-and-coming figures such as Charles Chaplin, for whom she wrote and directed some of her first shorts, along with co-starring in them. Film mythology also syndicates her as the first person to throw a cake in the face of an actor – in 1913, in an Arbuckle film – initiating an endless tradition in American physical comedy.
After distancing herself from Mack Sennett, she set up her own production company. Unfortunately, she died very prematurely in 1930, after a progressive deterioration in her health.
The homage to Mabel Norman includes four shorts she directed and starred in, which were made 110 years ago: Mabel’s Strange Predicament, Mabel’s Married Life, Caught In A Cabaret, and Mabel At The Wheel.
The case of Aelita is different. Within a production framework dominated by the symbolic weight of editing and a strong political-historical vocation, this film is a rarity that tells the story of a young man who travels to the planet Mars, to incite a proletarian revolution against the king, with the support of Princess Aelita, who has fallen in love with him. In its visual texture, the film moves diametrically away from the montage cinema that Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and, shortly after, Vertov established as the Soviet aesthetic during the 1920s. Aelita’s progression is essentially linear and its aesthetic vision is closer to the expressionism of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari than The Battleship Potemkin, as it combines realistic interiors with lavish futuristic sets that will influence the sci-fi genre, starting with what Fritz Lang achieved with Metropolis three years later.
Dimitri Kirsanoff, a filmmaker of Russian origin, moved to France around 1920, where he began his work in cinema, which was enhanced by his marriage to French actress Nadia Sibirskaïa, who starred in some of the films Kirsanoff made during that decade. The program, which brings together both artists, includes Ménilmontant (1926), perhaps his most celebrated film, and the short film Brumes d’automne (1928).
Ménilmontant is a brief picture of only 38 minutes that shows the miserable lives of two orphaned sisters in that poor Parisian neighborhood that gives the piece its title. The movie opens with a brutal murder filmed with short, sharp, and intermittent shots, which are then contrasted with very tender images of the young protagonists, tangential victims of this violence, and then both girls at the cemetery. This fragmented and elusive style gives life to Kirsanoff’s construction, in a middle ground between the avant-garde style of French cinema in the 1920s and a first approach to the naturalistically inspired poetic realism of the following decade, foreshadowing, in a way, a filmmaker like Jean Vigo.
Although the script of Brumes d’automne is an exercise in great simplicity, its attributes lie in the predominance of the montage and in the poetic character with which the director intertwines the images of a devastated woman who burns a set of letters, with shots of streets, buildings, and nature, which serve as a commentary and complement. Here, the gravitas and intensity of Nadia Sibirskaïa’s face is key, as the full weight of the short film is carried in her gestures.
This program is possible thanks to the support of Ambassade de France au Chili and Institut Français Chile.
Filmakers in Focus
This year FICValdivia has programmed four series devoted to filmmakers who, from different productive realities, have approached creative scenarios of greater independence and experimentation. They are Spanish director Cecilia Bartolomé, Brazilian author André Novais Oliveira, Belgian filmmaker Messaline Raverdy, and Spanish-Venezuelan artist Elena Duque.
Trained at Escuela Oficial de Cine de Madrid in the sixties, Cecilia Bartolomé (Alicante, 1940) obtained the reputation of a transgressive filmmaker virtually since her graduation film, Margarita y el Lobo (1968), which was banned by Franco’s regime, earning her entry into a blacklist that prevented her from directing a movie again, until the Spanish dictator’s death. Margarita y el Lobo is a satire with musical theater elements that exemplifies the status of women during the times of Francisco Franco. The film confirms a rabid will to renew the forms in Spanish cinema, which Bartolomé had already outlined in her previous school pieces, such as Carmen de Carabanchel (1965) – a fictional approach to the quotidian sexuality of middle-class women, a picture greatly influenced by the aesthetics of the Nouvelle Vague. That will was confirmed in her first feature, ¡Vamos, Bárbara! (1978), an account of a fifty-year-old woman’s liberation from patriarchal bonds, considered the first feminist title in the history of Spanish cinema. This FICValdivia focus is directed to the early period in her work and includes these three motion pictures.
One can say there are two kinds of filmmaker. Those who make the portrait of a landscape, and those who make landscape a portrait. André Novais Oliveira belongs to the second category. His cinema, marked by an architectural rigor in framing, possesses at the same time and without contradiction, a unique sentimental density. People in his movies talk little and hide almost everything. His characters feel much more than they are able to express, and his camera auscultates opacities. His spaces, in turn, are always familiar, whether it is the house courtyard or a wormhole that opens to an unknown dimension.
At least since Fantasmas (2010), the first of his shorts to receive recognition at festivals, André Novais Oliveira has become one of the most unique voices in Brazilian cinema this century. His authorial brand is known for a poetic search for the quotidian; also, for often working with his relatives – father, mother, brother – as actors in his movie’s leading roles. His cinema is, however, far removed from a servility to the reproduction of immediate reality. His filmography is capable of delirious crosses between science fiction and a comedy of manners (Quintal, 2015), a self-reflective essay and a romantic drama (Fantasmas, 2010), urban cartography and a learning novel (Temporada, 2018), metacinema and a coming of age movie (Pouco Mais de um Mês, 2013), a love letter and an experimental essay (Pai, 2020), and of blazing paths seldom traveled by current Latin American filmmakers, such as pure-bred romantic comedy (O Dia que Te Conheci, 2023). In three feature films and an incomparable set of shorts, André Novais Oliveira has been building a production that is both simple and deeply mysterious, made with few narrative resources, and an infinite amount of imagination. All these works, together with his first feature Ela volta na quinta (2015) and his latest short film Quando Aqui (2024) will screen at FICValdivia, with the author in attendance.
From her studies in philosophy, literature, and visual arts in Paris 7, Belgian filmmaker Messaline Raverdy drifted towards experimenting with the materiality of different film media, both Super 8 and archival material – often old films – to make with them a reflection on memory, intimacy, and identity, building bridges with Belgian icons of first-person essay cinema, such as Chantal Akerman, Boris Lehman, and Eric Pauwels. Her FICValdivia focus will present her medium-length Derrière les volets (2018). Beginning with objects and memories of her grandmother, the director relates the idea of fleeting existence and the social and work relationships in a family factory that no longer exists, all the while expecting her first child. Also in the program is her recent medium-length documentary Ote-toi de mon soleil (2023), where she records the daily life of Joseph, a marginalized hoarder who collects papers and objects of all kinds, turning his crammed home into a maze. Again, the obsession with objects as identity-builders seeps into this work, which, nevertheless, does not neglect the attentive and affectionate observation of its characters. Messaline Raverdy’s visit to our country is made possible by a partnership with the Belgian Embassy in Chile, Wallonie-Bruxelles International, and the Délégation générale Wallonie–Bruxelles au Chili.
Mar de Coral (2021), a short silent film that showed in the Tramas section at FICValdivia 29, was the first Chilean encounter with Elena Duque’s work; in this case, it was an experimental piece that takes footage in Super 8 of diverse nature and organizes it based on its shades of color.
Duque has built her work as a filmmaker in parallel with her activities as a festival programmer, critic, and editor. Her work is composed of filmic miniatures where she explores the memory of a place, an object, or a texture that makes up part of her biography, while playing with the possibilities of cinema through stop-motion animation, collage, and painting, to exploit the geographical, affective, and imaginative elements that cross it.
Elena Duque will screen her works in digital and super 8mm La Mar Salada (2014), Valdediós (2019), Colección Privada (2020), Patio (2024), Mar de Coral (2021), Ojitos Mentirosos (2024), and Cruzando el Río (2024). She will also show Curso de pintura rápida para principiantes (Quick painting course for beginners), a film performance in 16mm composed of Para Sonia (2023), Naturaleza Muerta (2023), Pintura-acción (2023), and Retrato sentado (2023).
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.
