Tomorrow, Tuesday the 19th, a new edition of Punto de Vista will start, Punto de Vista 8. Now, after being an International Seminar last year, it’s back to festival shape, with a programme that will help audiences wonder about and reflect on the world around them. The opening event, focusing on Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho and his film As Cançoes, is on Tuesday 19 February at 8pm, at the Saide Carlos III Cinema Theatres. Admission is free; tickets have to be collected at the box office one hour earlier. Film screenings begin on Tuesday 19 at 10am, promising to turn Pamplona into the Mecca of documentary film for six days.
As Canções is a deceptively simple film where 18 people face the camera to sing the songs that have marked their lives and tell stories associated with them. Stories about love, break-ups, reunions, betrayal, death or happy endings. ‘What’s the purpose of music?,’ Coutinho asks Queimado, one of the unforgettable characters in As Canções: ‘There’re smells, but you’re not smelling all the time. But music… you listen to it, you sing, and you’re bound to have memories of it.’ In the words of the director, ‘Music is like a wick that kindles memory, making it more affectionate. This is a film about feeling.’
The best known Brazilian documentary maker of the past 30 years, Coutinho has become the voice of Brazilian people, a sentimental witness of an ever-changing country through a limited number of revealing films that are open spaces, shared with protagonists. Punto de Vista will be paying tribute to him this year.
Tickets for Punto de Vista sessions will be available for sale from Saturday 9 February. Session tickets are €4, and there is a ticket package (five sessions) for €15. All the sessions will take place at the Saide Carlos III Cinema Theatres, except for Processes and special events, to be held at Civivox Condestable. This will also be the venue of the exhibition Emak Bakia: Objects Found, and the closing ceremony on Sunday 24. Free tickets for the opening ceremony, on Tuesday 19 at 8.00pm, can be picked up at the box office one hour before.
The full programme and the handbill are now available for download on the Festival’s official website. Tickets can be bought here online.