02/24/2021
Once again, Paisaia will bring together the most recent Basque-Navarrese short films and its filmmakers. Special sessions will also include a piece by the American composer Pauline Oliveros and a screening of Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre, filmmaker Jean Claude-Rousseau’s first film.
Special sessions at Punto de Vista 2021 will take the notion of the documentary beyond screening.
Paisaia, part of the special sessions, focuses on the more daring side of Basque-Navarrese documentary film, recent works which experiment with the aesthetic and narrative possibilities of non-fiction. The selection of titles this year explores biographies reconstructed in voiceover using different techniques —photographic and epistolary archives, telephone conversations— and invites meditation on memory, life journeys and Basque heritage. The following films will be screened as part of the programme: Zerua blu (2020) by Lur Olaizola, Un retrato de N.B. (2020) by Peio Aguirre, Quebrantos (2020) by Koldo Almandoz and María Elorza, and Agiña (2019) by María Sánchez.
The festival’s special sessions will also include a selection of films under the title Carte Blanche, chosen by Nicole Brenez, professor at the Sorbonne and a member of the jury for this year’s Official selection. The directors chosen, René Viénet and Hu Jie, are examples of individuals who act alone, without financial or logistical resources, but who, through the sheer force of their intelligence, have fought the same dictatorship, be it in the immediacy of their present (in the case of René Viénet, born in 1944), or the still valid gravitational force of their past (in the case of Hu Jie, born in 1958). To do this, they have used ingenious images to counter disinformation, ideology, concealment and denial. The following films will be screened: Quo Vadis? I (2020) by René Viénet and Bertrand Renaudineau, Propaganda images of the Cultural Revolution (文革宣传画 WenGe XuanChuan Hua) (2014) by Hu Jie and AI XiaoMing, and Mao par lui-même by (1977) René Viénet, Francis Deron and Wu Xing-ming.
Nicole Brenez is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 and has been Director of the Analysis and Culture Department at La Fémis since 2017 and curator of the Cinémathèque Française avant-garde film sessions since 1996.
In his work filmed in Super 8, Jean-Claude Rousseau radically assumed some of the material properties of the format to stamp an ascetic sensuality on the filming, sound and assemblage of his Kodachrome cartridges. His poetry is not born of intellectual reflection, but of a contradictory, living process motivated by encounter with a transforming vision. His first film, Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre, which will be presented in another special session in a new digitised version which the director himself oversaw, is the very genesis of this process. The screening will be followed by a talk about the film by archive technician Carlos Saldaña.
As already announced, Punto de Vista 2021 will get under way on 15 March with the world premiere of Dardara by the Navarrese filmmaker Marina Lameiro, shot during the farewell tour of the rock band Berri Txarrak. The lyrics and reflections of Lekunberri-born songwriter Gorka Urbizu structure Lameiro’s documentary over the journey that in 2019 brought an end to twenty-five years of history. After the official presentation of the festival in the Chamber Hall at Baluarte, the 15th edition of the Punto de Vista Festival will kick off with this much awaited premiere.
The festival will come to an end with a work by the American composer Pauline Oliveros. The World Wide Tuning Meditation (2007) invites the public to use their voices, intoning vowel sounds and/or humming, and to listen together, no matter what their singing experience or language. This small meditation session will be led by Ximena Alarcón. Sounding in the way proposed is open to all regardless of experience. Finally, these become harmony, with common tones which move through the field of sound as the intonation develops at sonorous and metaphorical levels.
