Punto de Vista presents its full programme

Rebeca Esnaola, Regional Minister for Culture and Sports of the Basque Government; Garbiñe Ortega, artistic director of Punto de Vista, and executive director Teresa Morales de Álava have presented the full programme of the festival in a press conference. The event will be held in Pamplona from 2 to 7 March.

The Punto de Vista programme is organised in seven main blocks: the Official Selection, which will include films selected from among more than 1,000 sent from countries all over the world; Retrospectives, with a monograph on Anne Charlotte Robertson; a cycle dedicated to the German filmmakers Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Renate Sami and the Chilean Jeannette Muñoz, and a Thematic Section titled ‘An Oceanic Feeling’; DOKBIZIA, an encounter that brings together artists from different disciplines to exchange their ways of relating to reality; Punto de Vista Labs, as a space for the exchange of knowledge and collective creation; contemporary monographs through which Punto de Vista focuses its gaze on some of the leading filmmakers on the international scene; special sessions, with programmes such as X Films, an encounter with Basque-Navarrese filmmakers -Paisaia- or a tribute to Barbara Hammer; and finally, the educational programme, which is growing with the aim of continuously opening the festival up to new audiences.

This year X Films stands out, the ten-year-old project that allows the festival to go from a traditional role of exhibitor to become a producer of an audiovisual work. Two premises have been maintained since the start of the project: the creative quality of the selected works and the key role played in them by Navarre. Maddi Barber was the filmmaker selected last year to develop her artistic proposition -the film “Gorria”- which will be premiered in the festival.

On 13 February X FILMS X was presented in Madrid, a programme that celebrates its anniversary along with the Instituto Cervantes. The festival has reached an agreement whereby the films produced over these ten years are exhibited in venues located all over the world.

There will also be another space for the internationalization of the festival and recognition of the role of Navarre. For the second year running, the Cinematek in Brussels will programme a selection of titles screened in Punto de Vista 2020, in a cycle that will take place on 25 and 26 April with the presence of Garbiñe Ortega.

In this line of the audiovisual representation of Navarre, the other outstanding section is Paisaia, which will present the latest and boldest films by documentary filmmakers from the Basque country and Navarre. The collection is designed as an open exercise of aesthetic and narrative exploration. This year, the selection of titles poses a number of questions around the notion of memory. Each filmmaker approaches a different meaning: intimate, family, collective or historical memory. The films explore people’s need to set memory in the form of a narrative; or to manipulate it through filming and writing.

Key films in the Official Selection
Great names of contemporary filmmaking such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ben Rivers, Éric Baudelaire, Lynne Sachs, Ana Vaz and Laura Huertas Millán will be present in the Official Selection. We would highlight the films that have had world premieres in the Rotterdam and Sundance festivals in January, and in Berlin in February and have chosen Punto de Vista to continue with their first international screenings. Films such as “Aquí y allá” by Melissa Liebenthal, “Apiyemiyekî?” by Ana Vaz and “małni - towards the ocean, towards the shore” by Sky Hopinka. There will also be three world premieres in the Official Selection: “Reseve” by Gerard Ortín Castellví, “Malembe” by Luis Arnías and “Notas, Encantaciones: Parte I” by Alexandra Cuesta.

The audiovisual sector, present in the festival
Filmmakers, producers, distributors, journalists, academics, artists, students, national and international festival directors and programmers and representatives of cultural institutions will be in Pamplona for Punto de Vista. Most of the directors of the 23 films in the Official Selection will be present, together with protagonists of the retrospectives, filmmakers with films in other sections, artists and academics with activities in DOKBIZIA and Punto de Vista Labs, the members of the jury of the Official Selection and X Films, the candidate for X Films 2020 and the directors of nine of the 10 films awarded the first prize in the X Films since it started in 2010.
Punto de Vista has consolidated itself as a meeting point of the audiovisual sector related to non-fiction cinema. Among the 400+ accredited visitors there will be representatives from the San Sebastian Film Festival, the ICAA, the Centre Pompidou, the Museo Reina Sofía, DocLisboa, Harvard Film Archive and Haus der Kulturen der Welt among other festivals, museums and national and international cultural institutions.

Book on the retrospective of Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Jeannette Muñoz and Renate Sami
The Punto de Vista 2020 publication, the fourteenth in the Colección Punto de Vista, is dedicated to Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Jeannette Muñoz and Renate Sami, German and Chilean filmmakers who feature in one of the 3 retrospectives this year.
This publication, the first to explore the connections between the work of the four artists from different generations, is a portrait of the constellation of collaborations that they have developed over the years, together with their friendship and the influence they have had on each other.

Tickets on sale
Tickets for all the screenings and activities in the festival are now on sale on the website and at the ticket office of Baluarte. During the days of the festival an extra ticket office will also be provided in the foyer of Baluarte. The price of the tickets is 3 euros each, except for the sessions in the Planetarium (5 euros) and in Civivox Condestable (free of charge).

Volunteers and the Youth Jury
This year the festival has received around 100 applications to take part as volunteers and on the Youth Jury.
Volunteers can get to know each other in the festival and will receive accreditation that gives them access to all the screenings and activities. They will help in different areas: assistance during projections/conferences, videography, photography, communication, reception of guests, etc.
The Youth Jury will consist of 20 people between 18 and 25 years of age and it will award the Youth Prize of 1,500 euros. The members of this jury will see all the films in the Official Selection in the morning sessions and will receive accreditation.

Partners of the festival
In the search to expand the festival territorially and widen its audience, Punto de Vista has several partners this year.

The Goethe-Institut supports the retrospective and the book on the German filmmakers Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl and Renate Sami and the Chilean Jeannette Muñoz. This cycle will then go to the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the CCCB - Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona and the CGAI - Centro Galego de Artes da Imaxe.

The presence of the three members of the Official Selection jury -Haden Guest, Simon Field and Hila Peleg- is possible thanks to the support of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) through its Programme for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture (PICE) in the ‘Visitors’ modality.

The Institut Français will facilitate the visit of Nathalie Trafford, a member of the X Films jury.

The Instituto Cervantes has developed the X FILMS X programme together with Punto de Vista in a special edition for the 10th anniversary of X Films. Centres of the Instituto Cervantes around the world will hold screenings of the ten films made in Navarre that have been produced by the festival.

Locally, Pamplona City Council, the Planetarium of Pamplona and Fundación Caja Navarra are supporting the festival’s educational programme, with activities in the month of February and during the festival in March, Filmoteca de Navarra will collaborate as home to the educational programme and one of the screenings, and the Faculty of Communication of the Universidad de Navarra will host a seminar for researchers with Haden Guest as invited speaker, while the Teatro Gayarre will also be a venue for the festival with a documentary theatre play. The Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Huarte once again offers its ‘Bajo Cero’ programme with a workshop by the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué, and the students of the programme can attend the other two activities by Mroué in the festival.

In Pamplona, the festival has a series of partners in the form of hotels that accommodate the main guests, such as Hotel Tres Reyes and Hotel Maisonnave, and other establishments where parallel activities to the festival programme take place, such as Katakrak, Casa Manolo, El Nébula or Nicolette. Reyno Gourmet and Bodegas Artazu will supply products from Navarre for the welcome cocktail held in Geltoki. It will be a thematic cocktail, focusing on gastronomy and the spirit of the film “Zumiriki” (after its screening), created by Dani Lasa and the chef from Fitero (southern Navarre) Javi Vergara.