Tales of Two Who Dreamt
Tales of Two Who Dreamt is set in a housing block in Toronto and pivots on representation and self-representation. Here, a Roma family rehearses the stories of their past for the upcoming hearing on their residency status.
Nicolás Pereda
Andrea Bussmann
Also Directed by Nicolás Pereda
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.
Eleven award winning directors explore why nearly one out of every two students in Latin America never graduates high school.
When Gabino's father returns home after a long absence, the two men awkwardly attempt to re-establish a relationship; but Gabino and his mother quickly tire of this man who has become a stranger to them and decide to kick him out, before realizing that he has already left. Gabino eventually tracks his father down and spends time with him in his rundown apartment, trying to figure out if there is any possibility for the two of them to ever truly communicate. Though Greatest Hits continues Pereda's exploration of his perennial themes of absence, masculinity and the difficulty of maintaining a family, it opens up a whole new set of aesthetic questions through a bold formal gambit: halfway through, the entire narrative reboots and starts from scratch with another actor playing one of the key characters, leading to different iterations of events already witnessed.
The Palace is a documentary that follows the everyday life of seventeen women who live together, sharing a large house for emotional and financial reasons. They help each other to train for various jobs. Most become nannies, domestic workers and private nurses for elderly patients.
Vicente (Gabino Rodríguez) is a young farmer in a rural village who scrapes by while taking care of his ill grandmother. Several of Vicente’s uncles intend to their ailing mother’s land without her knowledge. Vicente seeks help from the municipal president who, between shooting hoops on a desolate court, tells him that if he wants justice, he must head to the capital to meet with government officials. Although he hasn’t seen her since he was a child, Vicente sets off in search of his mother, who works as a maid in maze-like Mexico City. With the help of his mother’s employer, a sophisticated middle-aged woman, he finds the government offices where he presents his case. His situation isn’t easily resolved, especially since he does not have the deed to his grandmother’s plot of land, and Vicente finds the complexities of the legal system to be completely overwhelming.
An itinerant mover works from the streets of Mexico City with his partner and lives with his beleaguered mother. A heightened tension within the home – by the absent older brother and unmentioned father. Gabino's casual pursuit of a career is interrupted by a series of intense and almost satirically telenovela-esque domestic vignettes.
A series of auditions is taking place in a museum-like living room. Various men improvise or deliver prepared lines, rehearse gestures and slogans, aim guns, and collapse as if mortally wounded. The theme of revolution is repeatedly invoked. In between, there are scenes of a desert landscape. Three men seeking to join the Mexican Revolution at the beginning of the last century have lost their way. Conflicts smolder among them, water is running low, and mutual mistrust is beginning to take hold. Placing the reenactment of a possible historical event alongside the preparations for it serves to underline the theatricality of every cinematic account of history. Moreover, on a kind of playful meta-meta-level, the scenes in which the actors feel their way through set pieces from a Beatles song or standard battle slogans allow the viewer to witness the simultaneous construction and deconstruction of a collective myth of revolution.
Summer of Goliath is a documentary/fiction hybrid that narrates various stories of the people of the town of Huilotepec in rural Mexico. Teresa's husband has disappeared and she believes he has left her for another woman. Gabino, her son, is a soldier who searches cars at the side of a country road, where very few cars pass by. He hopes one day him and Alberto, his soldier partner, will get machine guns to further intimidate the people driving by. Amalio, Nico, and Oscar are three brothers whose stories we learn through a series of interviews and reenactments. Their father left them many years ago, and their mother can barely support them. Oscar has gained the nickname Goliath after the mysterious death of his girlfriend.
Carefully shot in black and white, All Things Were Now Overtaken by Silence is a meditation on the filming of a strange play: a fascinating monologue by actress, director, performance artist and political activist Jesusa Rodriguez of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz’s poem First I Dream.
Enigmatic and deceptively playful in tone, this film from Gabino Rodríguez, in collaboration with Nicolás Pereda, boldly transforms mundane, realist observations at a rural Mexican schoolhouse into fantasy and a sly comment on childhood, rituals, and race.
Also Directed by Andrea Bussmann
A masterclass in the art of digital cinematography thanks to the efforts of Mexican maverick Nicolás Pereda (director of Perpetuum Mobile), it's a highly unusual 'behind the scenes' record of a film-shoot in Mexico City - namely, Michel Lipkes' Malaventura. Bussmann concentrates on the elderly gents who appear in one atmospheric bar-scene, observing them between takes and interviewing them about their lives. The gently-paced results cast a steadily hypnotic, and intoxicating spell.
On the Oaxacan coast of Mexico, rumblings of previous times are never far from the surface. Tales of shapeshifting, telepathy and dealings with the Devil are embedded in the colonization and enslavement of the Americas. Characters from the Faust legend mingle with the inhabitants, while attempting to colonize and control nature through a seemingly never-ending building project. Through literature, myth and local entanglements, the frontier between reality and fiction, and the seen and unseen, no longer apply.