THE FIFTH WALL

In a constant effort to reinvent itself as a documentary film festival, the 11th Punto de Vista will feature The Fifth Wall, a programme tracking documentary film into new havens or spaces in a modern, much needed review of the new collective forms of chronicling reality. Accordingly, most The Fifth Wall activities will take place outside movie theatres, many times without even films to screen. The idea is to keep abreast of and draw attention to emerging narratives of the real that have eluded the screen and found their way into adjacent territories in an effort to keep an ancient habit – giving voice to real life – alive.

The title, The Fifth Wall, is an allusion to the fourth wall, a performance convention according to which an invisible, imaginary wall separates the actors from the audience. Here we are adding a new wall so that the audience can be seen from the stage (and vice versa) in interactive, transparent plays inviting the performers and the audience to look at each other. The goal is to bring them other: staging and viewing, blurring the boundaries and giving rise to a common space. To create a setting in which life and the documentation of it are both offered when the curtain rises.

The Fifth Wall is meant to extend the Festival across the city, bringing it out of movie theatres and reaching a wider, more diverse audience apart from movie-goers. Self-theatre, bioplay, theatre of the oppressed, performance and live film are some of the genres in this cycle of new narrative forms.

The Fifth Wall titles:

• Maruja Enamorada [Maruja In Love] (70min, 2013), starring Maruja Bustamante and Iti el Hermoso. An example of bioplay, of the theatre of the real that is all the rage in Argentina, as staged by the genre’s greatest representative, Vivi Tellas. When you stage life itself, no-one is really performing. The result is a play with the highest level of MFT (Minimum Fiction Threshold). A couple in real life tell of their love affairs from the woman’s point of view. Her current boyfriend stands for her past boyfriends. Nothing is invented or fictionalised. Life as it is. 
  Sunday 5 March. Gayarre Theatre.
• Nadia (80min, 2014), by Nadia Ghulam. Theatre using film screening as a narrative technique. Nadia shows the harsh reality of an Afghan refugee, who tells the story of her ordeal in the flesh and through live images. When she was eight, Nadia was injured in a bombing. The physical aftereffects forced her to pretend she was a boy. Today, Nadia lives in Barcelona and works for an NGO. She is coming to Pamplona to share her story on the stage.
  Tuesday 7th March. Gayarre Theatre.
• Etiquette (30min performance, 2015), by Anthony Hampton and Silvia Mercuriali. A show in the self-theatre genre, in which the members of the audience become the protagonists, interacting with the performers following the instructions they get in their earphones. They will be sitting in pairs, at the tables of two cafés.
  6th-11th March, morning and afternoon. Café Niza, Café de la Plaza/Baluarte.
• La película jamás vista [The Movie Never Seen] (40min, 2017), by Nofilms Productions. An encounter with film as an act of faith, only for those who believe in what they cannot see. Surprise film screening.
  Wednesday 8th March. Baluarte.