The 8th Punto de Vista Festival, being held in Pamplona as of 19 February, will officially begin with As Canções, the latest film by one of our guest stars this year: Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho. The Festival’s closing event will be the screening of Dime quién era Sanchicorrota, Jorge Tur’s first feature film, winner of the X Films Project 2012.
Opening songs
The opening event of the 8th Punto de Vista Festival will be on Tuesday 19 February at 8.00pm, at the Saide Carlos III Cinema Theatres. Coutinho himself will be there to present As Canções in its Spanish premiere.
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.
Closing Bardenas
If the Festival kicks off with the sentimental memories of Brazilian people, it will come to a close with another peculiar approach to local history. For Bardenas Reales in Navarra is the location of the film resulting from the X Films Project 2012: Dime quién era Sanchicorrota, by Alicante-born director Jorge Tur. In search of the legendary fifteenth-century outlaw who robbed from the rich to give to the poor, this film humorously explores the impossibility of reconstructing the past and the ways in which history surfaces around us. It will be screened on Sunday 24 February at 10.00pm, at the Saide Carlos III Cinema Theatres, Screen 3.
With the X Films Project, Punto de Vista offers emerging documentary makers the chance to make their Navarra-based audio visual essays. The 2012 Selection Committee was made up by Gervasio Iglesias (producer, director of La Zanfoña Producciones), Félix Piñuela (director of TVE’s Versión Española) and Eli Lloveras (director of the video distribution company Hamaca). They chose Jorge Tur’s project for ‘his original relationship between past legends and the present through surprise and humour, his empathy with his characters and their surroundings and his insistence in finding treasures in the most desolate places.’
To watch the trailer of Dime quién era Sanchicorrota, click here.