Liminal
A FICUNAM commission for four directors, Liminal seeks to play with poetic affinities between film and music. Moving across aesthetic and generational differences, the film-makers explore this relationship through four distinct stories as to context and imaginary.
Also Directed by Philippe Grandrieux
Unrest is the third movement of a triptych by Philippe Grandrieux whose common thread is anxiety. The theme of Unrest is “la petite mort”.
A week after the Dayton accords, Phillipe Grandrieux visits Sarajevo accompanied by Sada, a Bosnian who is returning home after four years of exile.
Seymour, a young American, arrives in a city in Eastern Europe. He's accompanied by Roscoe who has come to negotiate the buying and selling of men and women. Seymour encounters Melania, one of Boyan's 'girls'. Boyan controls the people smuggling trade. Fascinated, Seymour wants to possess Melania, but the price he has to pay is tremendous: betray Roscoe. Seymour accepts the deal. Roscoe is eaten by dogs. Seymour must then affront a new life.
The action unfolds in a country about which we know nothing, a land of snow and forests, somewhere in the North. A family lives in an isolated house near a lake. Alexi, a young, pure-hearted man, is a woodcutter. Occasionally suffering from epileptic seizures and overcome by an ecstatic state, he is one with the nature around him. Alexi is very close to his younger sister, Hege. Their blind mother, father, and younger brother, silently observe this uncontrollable love. One day a stranger arrives, a young man slightly older than Alexi.
A handheld video camera explores image-surfaces as a visual collective unconscious: a TV screen, Polaroids, photos. A conceptually and formally compelling film about the idea of change, the loss of a revolution, the defying memory of the 70s decade.
Philippe Grandrieux evokes the obsessive relationship between two women whose existence is kept by a lugubrious voice and by Alan Vega’s and Marx Hurtado’s famous Saturn Drive Duplex.
We enter the film like into a dream. Paris. Lenz looks for Madeleine who has mysteriously disappeared. He encounters Hélène, a young woman bewitched by her self-destructive impulses. A crazy love develops between them. Louis and Léna, devoured by their jealousy, lead Lenz to follow, against his better wishes, Hélène into the subterranean world of a dark sexual exploitation network. Although lost, lost from the first, love is what saves us.
A serial killer stalks a woman he befriended after her car broke down.
Also Directed by Lav Diaz
A man is wrongly jailed for murder while the real killer roams free. The murderer is an intellectual frustrated with his country’s never-ending cycle of betrayal and apathy. The convict is a simple man who finds life in prison more tolerable, when something mysterious and strange starts happening to him.
Erwin Romulo, the late Alexis Tioseco’s best friend, recalls the events after the critic and his girlfriend’s untimely death in their home in Quezon City. Diaz makes use of one long take to allow Romulo an uninterrupted narration of the events. The pain of recalling is palpable.
A wandering peddler separates from his fellow salesman and becomes involved with criminals in the jungle.
A terribly cool, hip youth film that throws awareness to the winds of MTV rock and roll, and post Generation- X teenage wasteland fantasies.
Deliberately structured and less beholden to its narrative, the film is told in three parts, with each part pertaining to each of the three visits of the time-travelling visitor from when the country was fighting for independence from Spain.
Hong Sang-Soo’s Lost in the Mountains (South Korea, 32min) the visitor is the supremely self-centred Mi-Sook, who drives to Jeonju on impulse to see her classmate Jin-Young – only to discover that her friend is having an affair with their married professor, who Mi-Sook once dated herself. The level of social embarrassment goes off the scale. In Naomi Kawase’s Koma (Japan, 34min), Kang Jun-Il travels to a village in rural Japan to honour his grandfather’s dying wish by returning a Buddhist scroll to its ancestral home. Amid ancient superstitions, a new relationship forms. And in Lav Diaz’ Butterflies Have No Memories (Philippines, 42min) ‘homecoming queen’ Carol returns to the economically depressed former mining town she came from – and becomes the target of an absurd kidnapping plot hatched by resentful locals. Serving as his own writer, cameraman and editor, Diaz casts the film entirely from members of his crew and delivers a well-seasoned mix of social realism and fantasy. —bfi
The boy has something to do in his life, he trains himself and makes plans. Then there is a knock on the door and something pulls away and he literally stays in the rain. Lightning and thunder patter the water, devouring everything. Incredulous, the boy looks up to heaven - is this his destiny?
A lowly farmer whose wife is afflicted with a lingering illness gets involved in kidnapping that goes awry and culminates in tragedy. Years later, he turns to a crusading lady journalist to confess the details of the sensational crime that remains unsolved.
After spending the last 30 years in prison, Horacia is immediately released when someone else confessed to the crime. Still overwhelmed by her new freedom, she comes to the painful realization that her aristocratic former lover had set her up. As kidnappings targeting the wealthy begin to proliferate, Horacia sees the opportunity to plot her revenge.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Also Directed by Manuela de Laborde
Manuela de Laborde's experimental film, 'As Without So Within', explores the possibility that the surface of things is an entity worthy of is own depth for itself and in itself, demanding to be seen and confronted as such. The project accepted what is visual as emotion the moment the images were created with a focus on the sensorial.
Ficciones is a spell that conjures representations as if imagined from the perspective of the plant world, that which invents prior to consciousness, as a thinking before thinking (M. Marder). Ceramic sculptures were gardened for a year letting plant life grow on them as their skin. Four super-8 cameras were made into a mobile, thereby also filming the process and its shared motion. To embrace the filmed material as a fictional construction, it was optically printed and altered; to accompany the notion of the sculptures as possible chests, containers of heart, vocal sounds were recorded with Camila de Laborde and weaved into the film.
Azúcar y saliva y vapor explores minimalism and affection by providing a counter proposal, the cinematographic desire to be all-encompassing and three-dimensional, at times to a nearly suffocating degree.
Abstract 16mm work documenting a group of artists immersed in the jungle among the surreal constructions of Edward James while creating sculptural works of their own. A diptych of the filmmakers' subjective style, it uses colour and black-and-white to create two separate dreamlike and fragmented expressions of a single event.
Intimate play locating the phenomenon of animation; once the hand comes in touch with the object, the other. La araña (Spider) to my hand is what my hand is to the spider. A duet, a revelation of intention, while leaving the point of inception unlit.
Luis Carricaburu executes the movement languidly but at the same time with emphasis, with generous patience, towards the camera, as if he feared that the negative would not be able to record it. The movement has been stripped of its perpetual combustion. Abstract gestures from their surroundings recombine to produce a language without content, ghosts of something that, elsewhere, is still alive at the same time.