Punto de Vista will dedicate its three Artists In Focus to Fukuda Katsuhiko, Ana Poliak and Pascale Bodet

02/16/2023

The Punto de Vista Festival –promoted by the Government of Navarra and organised by the public company NICDO– continues to announce the programme of the next edition, to be held in Pamplona from 27 March to 1 April this year. The festival is now announcing the figures it will dedicate its Artists In Focus to the Japanese director Fukuda Katsuhiko and the filmmakers Ana Poliak (Argentina) and Pascale Bodet (France).

In this way, Punto de Vista once again focuses on the history and the present of Asian filmmaking, with the screening of the film by Fukuda Katsuhiko (Tokyo, 1943-1998) Kusatori kusagami (The Grasscutter’s Tale) (1985), programmed and presented by Ricardo Matos Cabo. We thereby return to the historical orientation of the festival with its pioneering series El cine de los mil años (2006), evoked last year with the inclusion in the Official Section (out of competition) of Kazuo Hara’s extraordinary film Minamata Mandala. The programming of Kusatori kusagami has been done in cooperation with the Courtisane Festival of Ghent (Belgium).

The focus titled Freedom, is it possible? Ana Poliak´s Filmmaking, programmed and presented by Lucía Salas, will be shown in the Golem Yamaguchi cinema and will include double sessions with the feature films ¡Qué vivan los crotos! (1990), La fe del volcán (2000) and Parapalos (2004), each one preceded by one of their shorts. Pascale Bodet, winner of the Punto de Vista Grand Prize for Best Film last year for Baleh-Baleh, will be back in Pamplona to present a section of her films: Le carré de la fortune (2010), Presque un siècle (2019) and Porte sans clef (2018). The title of her series/spotlight, programmed and presented by Pablo García Canga, is Three adventures of Pascale Bodet.

 

Fukuda Katsuhiko: Kusatori kusagami (The Grasscutter’s Tale)

In its second edition in 2006 Punto de Vista dedicated its main retrospective to the history of Japanese documentary cinema. The programming and publication of El cine de los mil años offered a selection taken from several decades of non-fictional filmmaking in Japan. It was one of the most extensive programmes on the theme organised to date in Europe. The aim this year is to continue the dialogue begun in the past and contribute to greater European dissemination of the history of non-fiction cinema made in eastern Asia, thanks to the cooperation that the festival has maintained since pas editions with the Portuguese programmer Ricardo Matos Cabo.

The spotlight will consist of a single special section on the work of Fukuda Katsuhiko. He was a member of Ogawa Productions and actively participated in the extraordinary series of films made by this group between 1968 and 1978 on the fight of peasants and their allies against the construction of Narita Airport in the rural area of Sanrizuka, and against the violent repression of the State authorities. Fukuda left the group, which moved to Yamagata (northern Japan) in the late 1970s, and stayed in Sanrizuka, where he continued working on a series of films in 8 mm, among them the beautiful Kusatori kusagami (The Grasscutter’s Tale) in 1985, an intimate portrait of the life of an old peasant woman who stayed in Sanrizuka and continued to resist the airport project. The film marks a major change in documentary filmmaking in Japan, and also in its relationship with politics, as it focuses on small gestures and personal stories of people involved in political struggles. The film influenced many filmmakers who followed the steps and practice of Fukuda, and several books were published on Sanrizuka, its people and history.

The screening will be accompanied by a presentation illustrated by the programmer Ricardo Matos Cabo, who will show extracts of other films by Fukuda, provide information on his career and present images of films that have been influenced by his practice.

 

Kusatori kusagami (A Grasscutter’s Tale) [草とり草紙]

Fukuda Katsuhiko, Japan, 1985, 88 minutes, 8mm in 16mm, colour, Japanese

 

Freedom, is it possible? Ana Poliak´s filmmaking

Ana Poliak (Buenos Aires, 1962) is from a generation that came of age during the dictatorship in Argentina, in the midst of economic and political crises. The years when she made her three feature films were ones of absolute economic debacle. Although she started making films after the generation of the 1980s, she did not belong to the New Argentinian Cinema movement officially. ¡Qué vivan los crotos! (1995) is a film that exists in a space between fiction and documentary, bodies and spaces. The second film, La fe del volcán (2000), seeks the threads that directly tie anguish to the stories out on the street, with its rhythms and noises. Her last feature film to date, Parapalos (2004), works on the themes presented in the other two, constructing new, invented and acted stories with tales of people’s real lives and working conditions that are also real, poor and unusual.

The screenings in this series will be preceded and followed by presentations and colloquia between the programmer Lucía Salas and Ana Poliak herself. It will also involve the Argentinian Embassy and will travel to the Film Libraries of Spain and Catalonia in April. Punto de Vista thereby maintains its intention to extend its programming and give it a wider scope.

 

Session 1

Suco de sábado 

Ana Poliak, Argentina, 1987, 8.12 min, colour, Spanish 

¡Que vivan los crotos!

Ana Poliak, Argentina, 1990, 75 min, colour, Spanish 

 

Session 2

El eco 

Ana Poliak, Argentina, 1984, 3.33 min, colour, Spanish

La fe del volcán 

Ana Poliak, Argentina, 2000, 85.26 min, colour, Spanish

 

Session 3

Caracol 

Ana Poliak, Argentina, 1982, 1.30 min, black & white, silent

Parapalos 

Ana Poliak, Argentina, 2004, 90 min, colour, Spanish

 

 

Three adventures of Pascale Bodet

Last year, Pascale Bodet (Tunis, 1971) won the Punto de Vista Grand Prize for her film Baleh-baleh (2021). This year, we will get to know her work better through a spotlight that brings together three of her films, made by a filmmaker who expresses herself equally often in fiction and documentary.

We will see three feature films: Le carré de la fortune (2007), Porte sans clé (2018) and Presque un siècle (2019). They are films that seem to go forward transparently but always contain a secret, a different underlying story. In this way, the filmmaker is telling us something that happened at the time of filming, and the film is also an example of trust in the audience. She trusts our intelligence, our desire to take risks and perhaps to make mistakes.

The screenings in this series will be preceded and followed by presentations and colloquia between Pablo García Canga and Pascale Bodet.

 

Le carré de la fortune

Pascale Bodet, Emmanuel Levaufre, France, 2007, 160 min, colour, French

Porte sans clef

Pascale Bodet, France 2018, 79min, colour, French

Presque un siècle

             Pascale Bodet, France 2019, 52 min, colour, French