News From Navarra -- A showcase of Punto de Vista's anti-documentary documentaries.

Friday, July 16
7:30pm
at Millennium Film Workshop
66 E. 4th Street, NYC

A program of new Spanish experimental non-fiction, in conjunction with the festival Punto de Vista, selected by Doctruck and Uniondocs, and co-presented with Pragda. 

The Punto de Vista Documentary Film Festival is an annual festival held in Navarra dedicated to forms of cinema generically grouped under the heading of ‘documentary.’ Programmed by Artistic Director Josetxo Cerdán, films come from around the world, with an emphasis on finding rarities in form and subject. The festival seeks to reward risk-taking and non-narrative approaches, and to uncover glints in Spanish and World Cinema. 

AMANAR TAMASHEQ, Directed by Lluis Escartin, 2010 15', DVD
Best Short Film Prize Winner --PDV 2010

In Tuareg with English Subtitles
Lluis Escartín's Amanar Tamasheq  communicates a highly political message by respectful and reflexive means, delivered in an intelligent and poetic combination of sound and image. Escartin lived with Tuareg rebels in the desert of Mali, and turned his camera on them in order to bring back their messages -- to the degree that the mistranslations of language and history allow.

LOS MATERIALES, Directed by Los Hijos, 2009, 67', DVD
Jean Vigo Best Director Prize Winner -- PDV 2010

English Subtitles

Los Materiales explores an empty landscape around the reservoir of Riaño, in the province of León, in which the former town and nine other villages lie submerged as a consequence of a flood in 1987. The three members of Los Hijos, a young experimental filmmaking collective from Madrid, spent a year walking the area, and the resulting work is a spare, diffuse document of a village just below the surface of history. Subtitles replace dialogue, leaving the occasional background noise as the sole sound source, and the story reliant on written text. 

“’Los Materiales defies our expectations on audiovisual language (specially the sound edition and mixing), on certain landscape aesthetic, even on the motivation or the ethic of filmmaking.” Blogs and Docs

“Interesting and fearless, lively and stimulating, the film´s purpose is the exploration of Riaño, not only to dismember its dramatic structure but its semantic field.... The recovering of village´s history turns out to be impossible, just suggested, almost abstract, while the movie´s plot drives to metacinematographic issues and ends -in a mysterious, strange and disconcerting turn- becoming a terror history.”
Cahiers du cinema , España.

Discussion to follow with Josetxo Cerdán, María Adell of Pragda, and Spanish Film Critic Manu Yáñez.