Ospina, Simon and Guerín in the special sessions
Three well-known documentary film directors, Luis Ospina from Colombia, Claire Simon from France and José Luis Guerin from Spain, will be present in the programming of the 10th edition of Punto de Vista with special sessions of their latest films: It All Started at the End, The Woods Dreams are Made Of and Le Saphir de Saint-Louis. These three filmmakers join the Canadian filmmaker, Michael Snow, who will be the star of a special session with the screening of the masterpiece of experimental film, The Central Region, and he will also give a master-class in what is going to be the tenth anniversary of the Punto de Vista festival.
LUIS OSPINA (Cali, Colombia, 1949)
He studied Film at USC and UCLA. He co-directed the Cali Film Club between 1972 and 1976; the Ojo al Cine magazine between 1974 and 1977; he directed the Film Library at the La Tertulia Museum of Modern Art, in Cali, in 1986. He has made 2 full-length fiction films—Pure Blood (1982) and Breath of Life (1999)— and has made eight full-length documentary films, including Andrés Caicedo: A Few Good Friends (1986), Our Film (1993), The Supreme Uneasiness: Incessant Portrait of Fernando Vallejo (2003), A Paper Tiger (2007) and It All Started at the End (2015). He has also directed around twenty short films, such as Hear, See (1972) The Vampires of Poverty (1977), co-directed by Carlos Mayolo, film critic in publications such as Ojo al Cine, Kinetoscopio, El Malpensante, Número and Cinemateca.
He has lectured on film at Valle University, Javeriana University and Los Andes University. He is the author of the book Palabras al viento, Mis sobras completas (2007), a compilation of his writings on film; and the booklets by Andrés Caicedo: Letters from a Cinephile (2007). He has been the Artistic Director at the Cali International Film Festival since 2009. He was the curator of the Andrés Caicedo: Die and Leave Some Work exhibition (2012).
It All Started at the End (Colombia, 2015)
The latest long-length work by Ospina is the testimony of a dual convalescence, his own after a major health scare, and that of his own film group, the Cali Group, also known as Caliwood, in which a group of friends and film enthusiasts managed to produce a series of films that are now considered to be an essential part of Colombia’s film history. They did so in the midst of the wild and tumultuous 1970s and 1980s. It is not often that we see a film director telling us about his film from a hospital bed. Punto de Vista will premiere this film in Spain, which has already been successful at festivals like that of Toronto or Yamagata.
CLAIRE SIMON
She was born in London and brought up in the Var region of France. She began her career with the short film (Scènes de ménage, starring Miou Miou, 1992) and the documentaries, Récréations and Coûte que coûte —adapted to theatre—, which were a giant step forward for documentaries in France. Her first long-length fiction film (A Foreign Body, 1997) was programmed in the parallel section of the Cannes Festival. She later directed various documentaries (800 KM de difference / romance, 2001; Mimi, 2002); a film on the European Parliament that is between fiction and documentary (Ça c’est vraiment toi); a theatre play (Objets d’amour); and two fiction films (Ça brûle, 2006, Les Bureaux de Dieu, 2008). The film, Les Bureaux de Dieu, which brings us closer to the world of family planning services, received the SACD Award in the Directors’ Fortnight. In 2013, she directed fiction film (Gare du Nord) and documentary film (Human Geography), both of which are on the Gare du Nord train station in Paris. Since then, she has made two documentary long-length films: The Woods Dreams are Made Of and Le Concours.
The Woods Dreams are Made Of (France / Switzerland, 2015)
Portrait of an almost urban jungle, the Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of Greater Paris is what Claire Simon presents in her latest work. Like an accessible form of Paradise Lost within reach of all, everybody goes there to seek refuge or solitude, depending on how you look at it. The forest admits people from all social classes without any discrimination, and open its arms like a mirage dreamed up by the inhabitant tired of the city. Here, the difficulties of living in the city are left behind and a kind of green therapy appears: citizens play, have fun and dream, quite the opposite of what normally happens in their grey reality.
JOSÉ LUIS GUERIN (Barcelona, 1960)
He became known to the public with his fourth film: Under Construction (2001: first documentary long-length film awarded with a Goya). Following the success of this film, many film buffs and critics discovered the filmmaker’s previous films: Berta’s Motives, (1983), which follows the evolution of a teenager living in a small village in Segovia, a province with a flat and endless landscape; Innisfree (1990), filmed in Ireland following in the steps of John Ford and the filming of The Quiet Man (1951) ; and Train of Shadows (1996), presented as a documentary (screened at the Cinéma du Réel Festival in Paris) and as a fantasy film (Golden and Silver Méliès at the European Federation of Fantastic Film Festivals). Guerín mixes film writing, time and memory. In 2007, he made three films in different formats but on the same theme, that of the inaccessible woman: In the City of Sylvia. In 2009 he established a film correspondence with the American filmmaker of Lithuanian origins, Jonas Mekas who will be the object of an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre at the end of 2012. In 2015, he premiered The Academy of Muses (Golden Giraldillo at the Seville Festival).
Le Saphir de Saint-Louis (Spain, 2015)
The final documentary from the hands of the director from Barcelona, who is well known at Punto de Vista, will also see the light with its premiere in Spain on our tenth anniversary of the Festival. A perfect gift that will be rounded off with his presence to discuss the film and meet the film audience. The film is based on Saint-Louis Cathedral in La Rochelle, a cathedral that is not at all “flamboyant”, but hides unique treasure in one of its chapels in which the filmmaker puts his eye and… his soul. There, among a multitude of offerings from the Merchant Navy, a painting that is witness to the tragedy of the Saphir in 1741 can be contemplated, a slave schooner that was run aground in inter-tropical waters, with 271 slaves and 30 crew member aboard. This small painting is like a secret door in a cathedral that opens up to the big story.
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