CINE: ART OF THE REAL AT LINCOLN CENTER
Friday, April 11, 2014
, Posted by LATINO EVENTS Y TESPIS MAGAZINE at 11:25 AM
- La última película. Raya Martin & Mark Peranson, Mexico/Canada/Denmark/Philippines, 2013, 35mm, 88m
English and Spanish with English subtitles.
English and Spanish with English subtitles.
In this documentary within a narrative—and vice versa—a grandiose filmmaker (Alex Ross Perry) arrives in the Yucatán to scout locations for his new movie, a production that will involve exposing the last extant celluloid film stock on the eve of the Mayan Apocalypse. Instead, he finds himself waylaid by the formal schizophrenia of the film in which he himself is a character. Simultaneously a tribute to and a critique of The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper’s seminal obliteration of the boundary separating life and cinema), La última película engages with the impending death of celluloid through a veritable cyclone of film and video formats, genres, modes, and methods. Martin and Peranson have created an unclassifiable work that mirrors the contortions and leaps of the medium’s history and present.
Apr 11 at 6:30pm (Q&A with Mark Peranson and Alex Ross Perry).
- Castanha. Davi Pretto, Brazil, 2014, DCP, 95m. Portuguese with English subtitles. (foto arriba).
Davi Pretto’s first feature-length film chronicles the daily life of João Carlos Castanha, a middle-aged, single, ailing actor who supports both himself and his live-in mother by working as a cross-dressing nightclub MC. When in drag, Castanha plays the part of a larger-than-life scoundrel, verbally assailing the clientele while also enjoying periodic visits from friends backstage. On the side, Castanha finds work as an extra in film productions and taking bit parts in small plays. His greatest roles, and greatest loves, are in the past, making way for his repressed memories to take over, and finally allowing the line between his experience of reality and fantasy to blur, as the film takes haunting and confounding turns.
Apr 19 at 9:00pm
Apr 23 at 5:00pm
- La Libertad. Lisandro Alonso, 2001. Argentina | Format: 35MM | 73 minutesES.
Alonso’s landmark feature debut, based on months of closely observing its subject’s routines, follows a day in the life of Misael, a young woodcutter in the Argentinean pampas. Using long takes that are at once uninflected and hyper-attentive, La Libertad chronicles the stark facts and repetitive actions of Misael’s largely solitary existence: he searches for trees and chops wood, pauses to defecate or eat, prepares and transports the logs for sale, returns to his camp to build a fire and cook his dinner. The title crystallizes a question about this man’s life: is the cyclical daily grind a burden or a kind of freedom? Or does the title refer to Alonso’s conception of an anti-dramatic, materialist cinema, absolutely in-the-moment and liberated from the traditional confines of fiction and documentary? “An account of everyday work that transforms the banal into poetry, maybe even myth,” James Quandt wrote of La Libertad, named one of the top 10 films of the past decade in Cinema Scope magazine. Print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.
- Mudar La Vida (Change of Life). Paulo Rocha.
Portugal | Portugue | Format: Digital projection | 90 minutes.
Paulo Rocha's second feature, conceived as a direct response to his mentor Manoel de Oliveira’s Rite of Spring(which Rocha worked on as well), is a masterpiece of “sculpted reality,” using fictional conceits and non-actors cast as themselves to create an ethnographic portrait of Furadouro, a remote Portuguese fishing village. The dramatic premise, about a soldier returning home to a place that has changed in both subtle and obvious ways during his absence, serves as a pretext for Rocha to respectfully examine the specificities of Furadouro's people, their daily routines and rituals, and their evolving relationships with the village’s history.
- Lukas the Strange (Lukas nino). John Torres, Philippines, 2013, DCP, 85m. Tagalog with English subtitles.
Alonso’s landmark feature debut, based on months of closely observing its subject’s routines, follows a day in the life of Misael, a young woodcutter in the Argentinean pampas. Using long takes that are at once uninflected and hyper-attentive, La Libertad chronicles the stark facts and repetitive actions of Misael’s largely solitary existence: he searches for trees and chops wood, pauses to defecate or eat, prepares and transports the logs for sale, returns to his camp to build a fire and cook his dinner. The title crystallizes a question about this man’s life: is the cyclical daily grind a burden or a kind of freedom? Or does the title refer to Alonso’s conception of an anti-dramatic, materialist cinema, absolutely in-the-moment and liberated from the traditional confines of fiction and documentary? “An account of everyday work that transforms the banal into poetry, maybe even myth,” James Quandt wrote of La Libertad, named one of the top 10 films of the past decade in Cinema Scope magazine. Print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.
- Mudar La Vida (Change of Life). Paulo Rocha.
Portugal | Portugue | Format: Digital projection | 90 minutes.
Paulo Rocha's second feature, conceived as a direct response to his mentor Manoel de Oliveira’s Rite of Spring(which Rocha worked on as well), is a masterpiece of “sculpted reality,” using fictional conceits and non-actors cast as themselves to create an ethnographic portrait of Furadouro, a remote Portuguese fishing village. The dramatic premise, about a soldier returning home to a place that has changed in both subtle and obvious ways during his absence, serves as a pretext for Rocha to respectfully examine the specificities of Furadouro's people, their daily routines and rituals, and their evolving relationships with the village’s history.
- Lukas the Strange (Lukas nino). John Torres, Philippines, 2013, DCP, 85m. Tagalog with English subtitles.
“Lukas, in the middle of the film, the actress will pay a visit. You’ll fall in love with her. And you’ll understand your father. I’ll become your memory. I haven’t shown you the middle yet.” Thus begins John Torres’s latest dream of a documentary, a highly experimental, gloriously free-form coming-of-age story. Shortly after the arrival of a film crew that throws his tiny, usually quiet village into a frenzy of commotion, Lukas’s father, Mang Basilio, announces that he is a tikbalang, the half-horse, half-man of Filipino folklore. When Mang Basilio disappears, the awkward, baffled Lukas sets out on a journey of self-discovery that will include a “river of forgetting,” invisible voices, and a hallucinatory blurring of reality and fantasy. Torres has already carved out an idiosyncratic niche for himself in the thriving world of documentary-fiction hybrids, and this is his most personal and expansive work to date.
Apr 18 at 5:00pm
Apr 20 at 8:30pm
- The Second Game. Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2014, DCP, 97m. Romanian with English subtitles.
In 1988, one year before the revolution that toppled Ceaușescu, Corneliu Porumboiu’s father refereed a soccer game between the country’s leading teams as heavy snow fell over the playing field and all of Bucharest. In 2013, father and son watched the original television broadcast of the game, providing their own commentary in real time. The static-heavy analogue video images mix with the grain-like flurries of snow to make this rather ordinary game into something altogether more complex and mysterious, as father and son’s discussion leads to the pondering of alternate events and different outcomes: what if the ball hadn’t hit the crossbar? What if the camera had captured the brief on-field fight? What if the match had taken place a year later? Investigating the slippery middle-ground where personal memory meets historical memory, Corneliu Porumboiu has created an entertaining and disquieting essay on the legacy of the Ceaușescu dictatorship for both Romanian society and his own family.
Apr 11 at 9:15pm (Q&A with Corneliu Porumboiu)
Apr 14 at 7:00pm
- Actress. Robert Greene, USA, 2014, DCP, 86m.This thoroughly compelling and at times thoroughly unnerving new film by Robert Greene (Fake It So Real) is a documentary that feels like intimate melodrama. Brandy Burre had a recurring role on HBO’s The Wire when she gave up her career to start a family. After a few years of life in the country, she decides to return to acting, and sets the denouement of her relationship in motion. As she comes apart on camera in varying shades of drama, it’s never clear at what level this film may simply be the next role.
Apr 26 at 8:00pm
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