Passes are now available for professionals, press and students for the 19th edition of the event, to be held in Pamplona from 24th February to 1st March
Punto de Vista, the international documentary film festival of Navarre, announces the first details of the programme for its nineteenth edition, to be held from 24th February to 1st March in Pamplona. The festival, promoted by the government of Navarre and organised by the public company NICDO, reveals the contents of its Focus and of the Lan and X Films sections.
In Focus will feature two retrospectives of the work of Dutch film-maker Frans Van de Staak and French film-maker Anne-marie Faux. Also, programmer and film-maker Miriam Martín presents the latest in the series she has devoted to the natural world over the last four years. Entitled Adiós a los animales, it is a series about the extinction of wild animals.
Lan ("work" or "job" in Basque), the section dealing with creative and production processes in documentary film, will make up the opening session of the festival, with a screening of the recent digitalisation by Filmoteca de Catalunya of Tent City, an unknown classic of Cuban cinema, with its director Miñuca Villaverde; Termites, featuring work from the emerging Spanish scene; and two talks about artificial intelligence practices applied to documentary film.
Finally, X Films, in collaboration with Centro Huarte, is to invite film-maker and visual creator Pablo Casanueva for an artistic residency in order to pursue a documentary essay project to be shot in Navarre in 2025. At this year's festival the results of this research will be shown, as well as a session of previous work of Casanueva, and the world premiere of the X Films 2024 project by Celia Viada Caso, Volver a casa tan tarde.
Passes for professionals, press and students can now be applied for through the festival website. Tickets for the general public can be purchase in the weeks before the Punto de Vista festival takes place.
In Focus: Adiós a los animales
Adiós a los animales is, as the title suggests, a film series about the disappearance of animals. Of wild animals, of course; livestock and pets are not disappearing. Yes, you are here, amid the "sixth mass extinction", the first that is not due to a natural phenomenon. Over five sessions we will see different kinds of relationship between humans and animals (from first encounters, amazed or fearful, to impure and simple exploitation, taking in games, ritual and fable), and also the life of different animals with no direct relations with humans (in an anthropised world all of them have indirect relations). Ten cinematographic adventures and misadventures starring penguins, seals, whales, snakes, elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, squirrel monkeys, frogs, lions, hyaenas, gulls, woodpeckers and muskox. Freedom, imprisonment and freedom again; familiarity and lots and lots of mystery; a pond and the confines of the earth; animals as things, as food, as companions.
In Focus: Frans van de Staak. The Word as Archipelago
Punto de Vista presents the first international retrospective devoted to Frans van de Staak (Amsterdam, 1943-2001), film-maker and visual artist. In each of his films, van de Staak rearranges the traditional elements of film - dialogue, mise-en-scène, performance, editing - in a structured and often humorous exploration of spaces and acts of language: from the writings of Spinoza and Wallace Stevens to life in a couple, the stage, Dutch improvised music and expressions. Van de Staak is rooted in a realist avant-garde that sees and hears the extraordinary in everyday voices, gestures and comings and goings. His work, admired by contemporaries such as Johan van der Keuken, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (who described him as "the sole heir of Dziga Vertov"), has hardly been screened outside the Netherlands. Thanks to collaboration with Eye Filmmuseum, this Focus, programmed by Carlos Saldaña and Manuel Asín, will be attended by Stefan van de Staak, the film-maker's son and collaborator in some of his last films, and will show in 16mm eleven of the director's twenty-five films, accompanying the publication of the first monograph on his work. In addition, the programme is also supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands.
In Focus: Anne-marie Faux. The river under the tongue
The melancholic, reflective work of Anne-marie Faux (Montfermeil, 1959), is presented as a set of film diaries in which the film-maker's voice guides us on the paths of memory - a collective, political memory marked by successive wars and revolutions - and a personal memory that evokes childhood, film, music and literature. Her films, shot in video or on Super 8, linger on some details (a flower, a window or a sheet billowing in a patio) that, like Proust's madeleine cakes, inspire and unleash long monologues about the history of places and about her own history. Other voices and languages join hers to shape a series of narratives in which cultures from Europe, North Africa and the Near East find a common feeling. This almost complete retrospective of her work, attended by the film-maker herself and programmed by Andrea Franco, will feature her four feature-length films for the first time in Spain: Hic Rosa, partition botanique (2007); Face au vent, partition buissonnière (2010); Le bruit du temps, Messaoud (2014) and Ostinato al-Ándalus (2017).
Lan: Tent City
Tent City is one of the essential films from the Cuban diaspora. Directed by Miñuca Villaverde, the film records the everyday life of several Cuban refugees who, after arriving in Miami in the Mariel exodus of 1980, were temporarily accommodated in an improvised camp in the heart of the city. Under Interstate 95, where Little Havana ends, a distinct micro-world opened up before the film-maker's eyes and camera, in a reunion with the country from which she had exiled herself fifteen years before. In her own words, "There lived men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, separated only by cloth they strung up between their beds, like floating walls." At once moving and thoughtful, Tent City recalls for our time an ephemeral, precarious human landscape that was condemned to disappear. Miñuca's unsettling, sensitive images, filmed at point blank with her Bolex and now restored in all their richness of textures and colours by Filmoteca de Catalunya, gives these human beings back their incessant search for agency and freedom. The screening will be accompanied by a conversation with Miñuca and her husband, film-maker and writer Fernando Villaverde, who was responsible for the sound and co-wrote the narrative of the film. They will be talking to Cuban film-maker and curator José Luis Aparicio.
This screening is thanks to Filmoteca de Catalunya (the institution that conserves Villaverde's film, the recent digitalisation of which is shown here), Cinéma du Réel (after last year's initial collaboration on audiovisual heritage film), and Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (which has set up research projects about Cuban archive film).
Lan: Termites
As in previous years, Punto de Vista opens up to the most diverse emerging Spanish documentary scene in its Termites section. Screenings will be accompanied by presentations by the authors about the creative and production process of their films and open to audience participation.
Lan: Artificial intelligence; practical alternatives in documentary film
The festival offers two public activities to think about a current topic that is affecting documentary practices directly: the latest developments in generative artificial intelligence.
In recent years we have seen a constant drip of innovations in the field of AI. In the face of a narrative of technological innovation as if it were something autonomous, justified in itself and almost futuristic, it is possible to take a principled position that considers how each tool works, placing them within the context and traditions from which they emerge and avoiding being dazzled by what is apparently new.
In this session, curator and researcher into visual culture Antonio Somaini (Sorbonne Nouvelle) and artistic collective Estampa discuss the scope of AI in contemporary visual culture. To this end, different audiovisual pieces by Estampa will be shown; these use computer vision, generative AI or deepfake. These pieces will be taken as a basis to discuss the limits and uses of these technologies, how they belong to different traditions, their socio-economic and ecological context, their non-normative uses and how they can be incorporated in fields like experimental cinema.
Antonio Somaini is the curator of the forthcoming exhibition at the Jeu de Paume Le monde selon la IA. The Estampa collective have done a lot of work about the uses and ideologies of AI, beginning in 2017 with the project programmatically entitled El mal alumno. Pedagogía crítica para inteligencias artificiales.
Films to be screened: ¿Qué es lo que ves, YOLO9000? (2019, 13:43), Especies marcianas (2021, 2:47), NSFW (2018, 2:00), Modelos de resonancia (wip, 4:00) and The Vertigo of the Ways of Seeing (2022, 17:02).
Three machines for seeing - the ATS-3 satellite, the CHIRP algorithm and the PRITHVI model - form the core of this talk by digital technology researcher and artist Guillem Serrahima and language philosophy and science researcher Ramón del Buey. The aim is to suggest an approach to artificial vision in relation to self-observation of our planet. Since the sixties a series of technologies seem to be enveloping the earth and in turn modelling our image of it. In performative format, this talk offers a tour of some of these systems and their sense of the world. To do this it will question the dichotomy between the organic and the artificial, and steer between images, world views, global policy and technologies that this vision machines bring with them.
X Films
The X Films project, through which Punto de Vista produces a new film every year, is to invite film-maker and visual artist Pablo Casanueva in 2025. In collaboration with Centro Huarte, the director will undertake an artistic residency to pursue his project and establish the basis of the film to be shot in Navarre in the course of 2025, to be premiered at next year's festival. Pablo Casanueva (b. Ribeseya, Asturies, 1995) uses film and images to narrate and research concepts of memory, cultural identity and politics. He deals with these questions through landscape and archive, focusing on the memory of the territory from collective and family viewpoints.
On the other hand, the invited film-maker at X Films in 2024, Celia Viada Caso, will be premiering Volver a casa tan tarde. This piece continues her exploration of stories of women rendered invisible. The film, organised in the form of ten short stories, explores different aspects of María Luisa Elío, a Navarrese writer and actress who lived in exile in Mexico.