Since 2014, Kassel Dokfest has been portraying an international film
festival every year to connect with other similarly orientated festivals
that put together their programs with the same passion.
FIDMarseille is an international
film festival which takes place every year at the beginning of July in
Marseille. It offers a program of more than a hundred films, including
fiction and documentary, short and feature films. FIDMarseille
is a reference festival for the independent cinema of today and
tomorrow, recognized internationally for the importance of its talent
scouting work and its strong focus on unique aesthetics and emerging
forms. It offers a challenging selection to a wide local, national and
international audience, attracting professionals worldwide.
FIDMarseille presents: (u)topia
How can the place where we live become a reflection of a way of life, or a space for questioning loss, memory and oblivion? The two films converse in the simplest terms with literature and imagination and offer an invitation to look around us, investigate and consider our relationship to what we call home.
Indoors, half-light: a young boy is seated by a desk, his mother at his side; he is reading a text printed on a sheet of paper laid out in front of him. Outdoors, sun: the end of a meal in the garden, hands clearing away the plates, another child hiding his joy behind a strange white fur mask making him look like a creature from another world. This brief film is the first in a series of adaptations by Beatrice Gibson of Utopia, a book first published in 1984 by the New York poet Bernadette Mayer. Chapter 4: “The arrangement: of houses and buildings, birth, death, money, schools, dentists, birth control, work, air, remedies, etc.” The boy is reading Bernadette Mayer’s development of this utopian program in the form of an inventory, in an updated version to include other arranged patterns: “There is no Instagram, Twitter is what birds do…”. The boy is reading, sometimes struggling with the words, his mother helping and guiding him. The desynchronization of sound and image frees the voices and the faces, magnifying their presence: listening, attention, playfulness, and joy. The sensuality of 16mm film acts like a luminous caress, an embrace. Leisure, utopia: the connection of both words enunciates a double credo. 1: Utopia, at least as imagined and written by a non-binary woman poet such as Bernadette Mayer, is a matter of everyday life, a form of life, here and now, one thing after another. 2: Utopia is, or should be, child’s play. Rarely has revolt against the world order been expressed with such a combination of power and simplicity. It goes on for two minutes, and seems tiny like a home movie, but it is as vast, intense, and beautiful as the world could be.
(Cyril Neyrat, FIDMarseille 2024)
… >>>
- Director: Beatrice Gibson
Spending the summer in the family home in Caracas, Ena takes up residence with her grandmother, Mamama, and her father. Her father lives in books and has undertaken the crackpot endeavor of saving Venezuela’s literary heritage, although we don’t know exactly from what, or why. After finding a postcard hidden in a book, Ena sets off on a quest for the mysterious work of a writer, Rafael Coronado, who seems to have used several pennames. LOS CAPÍTULOS PERDIDOS does not follow up on these promising intrigues. On the contrary, Alvarado sketches them like so many false leads, preferring to leave dangling the narrative dimension. Understated and elliptical, LOS CAPÍTULOS PERDIDOS creates atmospheres and stasis from which a sweet melancholy emerges. The character of the grandmother is irrevocably losing her memory. The young woman is trying to remember; her father is chasing after the rare works he still hasn’t found amongst the pile of dead leaves that, for Venezuela, books seem to have become – some great readers are dead, others have left to cross the Atlantic. We learn little about the socio-political situation – it’s an off-screen situation permeating the family bubble in echoes, allusions, and reverberations. The filmmaker adds a hint of sadness with the imposing bookcases, the large empty rooms in the house, and the desolate urban spaces. A vague sense of abandonment hovers over everyday life. From what personal story or collective history do the lost chapters of the title come? What we’re left with is what can be saved from being swallowed up by the torpor of summer, which we sense threatens the characters to their very core: the tenderness between the members of this family, a motorbike ride that offers our lucky eyes the vibrant energy of frescoes in Caracas, the modest sharing of a love of literature, and a poem rescued from oblivion.
(Claire Lasolle, FIDMarseille 2024)
… >>>
- Director: Lorena Alvarado
