Film-maker Manuela Serra and the programme ‘Ficciones de archivo’ about the work of Sofia Bohdanowicz and Payal Kapadia, Focus at Punto de Vista 2022

MS Slavic 7, Sofia Bohdanowicz y Deragh Campbell

02/02/2022

Serra will be presenting her only feature-length film, O movimiento das coisas, and through the films of Bohdanowicz and Kapadia she will discuss experimentation with archives.

The Punto de Vista festival - promoted by the government of Navarra and organised by the public company NICDO - continues to offer advance details of the programme for its forthcoming edition. It now announces the film-makers who will feature in Focus, retrospectives devoted to working film-makers who visit the festival to present their films, this year featuring women from different generations.

Manuela Serra is a veteran Portuguese film-maker who has made only one full-length feature, O movimento das coisas (1985), recently restored by Cinemateca Portuguesa. Abruptly interrupted careers are not uncommon in film, especially among women. Manuela will be visiting the festival to talk about her film and her forced distancing from the film world with programmer, film-maker and former member of the Punto de Vista programming committee Mercedes Álvarez.

She will also be sharing the focus with film-makers Sofia Bohdanowicz from Canada and Payal Kapadia from India, under the title Ficciones de archivo. Festival programmer Lucía Salas has selected films by the two of them with a common genre, archive fiction. One often talks about archives from a documentary point of view, but the idea here is to discuss their fictions. Sofia Bohdanowicz and researcher Sonia García López will be talking about archive adventures and misadventures and the possibilities for experimenting with them as a tool for researchers and creative talents. The presence of Sofia Bohdanowicz is possible thanks to the support of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) through PICE, its programme for the internationalisation of Spanish culture in the visiting category, and of the Canadian embassy in Spain.

Manuela Serra

Manuela Serra studied film at the Institut des Arts et Diffusion (IAD) in Brussels from 1971 to 1974. She worked as an editing assistant, in particular with archive material, on the film Deus, Pátria, Autoridade. She helped to found the VIRVER film cooperative, in which she worked as a screenwriter, producer and editor. By then she had already worked as a producer and assistant director on several medium-length films and on the film by Rui Simões Bom Povo Português. Between 1979 and 1985, she produced, directed and wrote the script for her first film, O Movimento das Coisas. In 1990 she started writing the script for a second film, Ondas, Ondulaçoes or O Movimento das Ondas, which was never made.

O Movimento das Coisas

Manuela Serra, Portugal, 1985, 88 min, Portuguese

Ficciones de archivo: Sofia Bohdanowicz & Payal Kapadia

Sofia Bohdanowicz is a film-maker from Toronto (Canada), founder of the production company MAISON DU BONHEUR. She has has retrospectives of her work screened at BAFICI, Seattle Northwest Film Forum, Cinemateca de Bogotá and DocLisboa. In 2017 the Toronto Film Critics Association awarded her the Jay Scott Prize, and in 2018 she was nominated for the Rogers Prize for best film for her documentary Maison du bonheur. Her third feature, MS Slavic 7, premièred at the Berlinale and was presented at the Harvard Film Archive. Bohdanowicz is a graduate of York University’s Film Production program, an alumni of Berlinale Talents as well as the TIFF Talent Accelerator. She is in post-production on her fourth feature, entitled A Woman Escapes, a co-direction with film-makers Burak Çevik and Blake Williams. She is currently in development on her fifth feature film, entitled A Portrait, which won the Kodak and Silverway Award during FIDMarseille’s co-production lab.

Payal Kapadia is a film-maker and artist based in Mumbai. She studied film direction at the Film and Television Institute of India. Her short films Afternoon Clouds and And What Is The Summer Saying were premièred at Cinéfondation and the Berlinale respectively. An alumni of Berlinale Talents, in 2019 she took part in the Cinéfondation - Résidence at the Cannes festival. Her first full-length feature, A Night of Knowing Nothing, was selected for the Directors' Fortnight stream at Cannes 2021, where it won the Golden Eye award for Best Documentary. Her next project, All We Imagine As Light, which was supported by CICLIC, Hubert Bals Fund and PJLF Arts Fund, is currently under development.

Ficciones de archivo / Archive Fictions

● Programme 1: Payal Kapadia

And What Is the Summer Saying?

Payal Kapadia, India, 2018, 24 min, Marathi

A Night of Knowing Nothing

Payal Kapadia, India-France, 2021, 96 min, Hindi-Bengali.

● Programme 2: Sofia Bohdanowicz

Never Eat Alone

Sofia Bohdanowicz, Canada, 2016, 68 min, English.

Veslemøy’s Song

Sofia Bohdanowicz, Canada, 2018, 9 min, English.

Roy Thomson