Lan is the festival’s section where we harvest different ways of thinking about the processes of imagination and work in documentary cinema
Paisaia offers a more alternative and emerging panorama of filmmaking, complemented by presentations by filmmakers and dialogues with them. The sessions are designed in a ‘forum’ format, creating physical spaces that make encounters between filmmakers and the public possible.
Termitas, running symmetrically to Paisaia, will show emerging or little-seen works from our immediate surroundings, by asking the filmmakers to also present materials from their work process. Its name comes from the article by Manny Farber called “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (1962) where we read about those films that “seems to have no ambition towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.”
The Super 8 format was first marketed in 1965. Its peak, between the early seventies and the mid-eighties, coincided with a global cycle of revolutions, defeats and transformations of the left, marked by the violent appearance of neoliberal policies at global level. In this context, Super 8 played a fascinatingly ambiguous role in terms of film-making practices. It played a decisive part in redefining the parameters of the political cinema that emerged from the cycle of 68, but also generated new, closer links between cultural practices, the fossil economy and the imaginative energies of expanding capitalism.
An unfinished film about the Yrupé flower, an Amazonian water lily, made during his exile in Buenos Aires, is the starting point for a poetic and political approach to the Zúñiga archive; it includes extracts from films, photographs, letters and other fragments of a collection that runs through 20th-century history, but also hard-to-find images, lost films, uncertainties and controversies; before finally perhaps today continuing his efforts in the areas of transmission, documentation and recreation, political commitment and care.
Once again Punto de Vista proposes a space where producers, creators, associations and festivals have a place for exchange and conversation about documentary film.