New Views and Opening Film

17 de August de 2020

Straight from this year’s Berlin Festival Forum exhibition comes the new documentary by Romanian Radu Jude Uppercase Print, which travels back to the country’s past in 1981 and retrieves the story of teenager Mugur Călinescu who, using nothing more than his own words, protested against the Ceaușescu government and its manipulation of history. From the Forum we also have Was bleibt I Šta ostaje I What remains / Re-visited, by Clarisse Thieme, who makes use of experimentalism to address the war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s.

The Spain/Switzerland co-production The Year of The Discovery, directed by Luis López Carrasco, arrives with an award from Cinema du Reel and from the Rotterdam Festival. The film returns to the Barcelona Olympics and the Seville Expo in 1992 and reveals the contradictions between the country’s self-created international image and its internal reality as protests erupt in Cartagena.

Constant nightmares lie at the heart of a pursuit for history and memories in Pajeú, a feature film by Brazilian filmmaker Pedro Diógenes, screened in the international competition section at FIDMarseille. Another Brazilian film in this year’s New Views is the documentary Now, by Dea Ferraz, which unveils the body’s relationship with images and the catalyst role played by cinema within this movement.

Los conductos, by Camilo Restrepo, concludes the selection. The Colombia/France/Brazil co-production, inspired by a true story, reveals someone tormented by the past. The feature film was screened at the Berlinale Encounters.

Opening film On October 7, the festival begins in grand style with a collective production. The selected opening film for the 9^th edition of Olhar de Cinema is the Brazilian Southern Sorceresses, by Beto Amaral, Eliane Caffé, and Carla Caffé, which merges staged performances and improvisations by seven street artists in São Paulo, exposing the longstanding endurance of gender and race discriminations. Selected for Cinelatino Rencontres de Toulouse, the feature film was never screened because of the Covid-19 pandemic.