After Oskar Alegria took over as Artistic Director the key concept was ‘Islands’ (2015). After a hiatus that almost ended in demise, the Festival came back stronger, like an island surrounded by many other festivals. Isolated from its terra firma counterparts, which screened more mainstream films, Punto de Vista stood apart, clinging to its singular programme.
The Milanese filmmaker, Luciano Emmer (1918-2009), made prolific film and television work: over seventy documentaries, eleven fiction feature films and many advertisements. This retrospective takes a diptych approach to Luciano Emmer’s art film: three sessions to explain the change from story to essay; from his initial dramatisation proposal of painting to the art film-essay in his last twenty years, when he decided to explore documentary films in the first-person, rethinking and explicitly citing his own previous films.
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.
Five faces or five profiles, perhaps it is better to say five outlooks that are presented here in this proposal to discuss meta-cinema on the personal side: when the filmmaker is filmed instead of doing the filming. Hunter hunted is the expression for this shot when the director of the film inadvertently creeps into the background of an image in a filming oversight. There are fetishists who collect them. Here, beyond the background and fetishism, the portraitists of these five figures are looking for them to be the close-up that reveals details that are blurred in the distance.