Bill Brown, J.P. Sniadecki and Christian von Borries to present their films at Punto de Vista 2013

As in past editions, Punto de Vista wants to show the work of the filmmakers who make the Festival’s international jury. This year we have three names standing for three disparate film concepts.

First of all, the winner of the Punto de Vista Grand Award 2011, J.P. Sniadecki. He is back with three new and very different films, two of them never shown in Spain before. Firstly, People’s Park, a feature film premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival, described by Shelly Kraicer (Vancouver International Film Festival) as a ‘brilliantly joyous conceptual documentary’ that ‘takes the vivid reality of an urban park, ’using an utterly unique method of filming: one continuous tracking shot'. Then there is Yumen, set in a quasi-ghost town that once thrived with oil in China's arid northwest, a fragmented tale of hungry souls, restless youth, a wandering artist and a lonely woman, all searching for human connection among the town's crumbling landscape. This film is coming to Punto de Vista after being screened for the first time at the Berlinale. And, finally, the short film The Yellow Bank: ‘Watching, waiting, and traversing: a portrait of Shanghai at the confluence of tempestuous weather, looming architecture, and murky waterways during a total solar eclipse,’ in the words of the director himself.

Bill Brown is a shy filmmaker who likes to work on the margins of the greatest hubs of the film industry in USA. He makes his films silently at home. Nine of them (2 to 43 minutes in length) will be screened at the Festival – a comprehensive introduction to his work in Spain. They are: Roswell, a fanciful, humorous look at the supposed crash of a flying saucer near Roswell; Hub City, a loving and fun portrait of Brown’s hometown; Confederation Park, a reflective, even sombre documentary presenting a pastiche of places across Canada where Brown used to live, its real subject being the limits of knowledge; Buffalo Common, picturing the Dakota towns sympathetically, as lonely frontiers, hauntingly beautiful in their woeful emptiness; Mountain State, a look at the lost past from the signs left by man and nature on the landscape; The Other Side, a personal essay documentary imbued with magical landscapes and searing observations softly spoken during the director's cinematic trek along the United States-Mexican border; Chicago Corner, whose starting point is a newspaper article about eviction due to demolition in a housing project in Chicago; Document, redacted version of the C.I.A. Inspector General’s Special Review of Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities; and Memorial Land (world premiere), a short non-fiction film examining some of the memorials built after the events of 9/11/2001, and the reasons why seven people made the unlikely decision to build them.

Last but not least, Christian von Borries, a filmmaker with a musical background quite far from orthodoxy, is coming to Punto de Vista with two films that are exercises in film vampirising. They are fresh, provocative movies, uncontained and uncontainable, made with nerve and snippets, denouncing the system on the basis of their own elements. The Dubai-in-Me is a film portraying business models and work conditions in Dubai, whereas Mocracy – Neverland in Me examines consumerism, capitalism, poverty and oppression, and the charity industry – a miniature democracy representing a multiplicity of voices doomed to failure.