Category: Film festival

BAFICI, Day 8
By Robert Koehler

I came to BAFICI with many expectations, including what may be turning out to be a hope-against-hope of seeing at least a handful of good Argentine films. (More on that, most likely, tomorrow.) There was the additional expectation of catching up with some interesting titles from Rotterdam; again, the jury’s out, but if Vignatti’s La Marea (to name one–Pia Marais’ befuddled Tiger-winning The Unpolished is another) is everyone’s idea of a good Rotterdam film, then we’re all in trouble.

You don’t get what you want, but maybe what you need. The last thing I …

BAFICI, Day 7
By Robert Koehler

Two cool dudes in Buenos Aires….

Reg Harkema, the towering (six-foot-six) Canadian Godardian, has been here with his complete works (A Girl is a Girl, Better Off in Bed, Monkey Warfare), and sounding rather amazed that BAFICI would even consider being the first festival anywhere to screen his complete works. A good thing it has, since it’s given me a chance to catch up with the 1999 A Girl, which starts with a sweet, good-natured tip of the cap to Godard–large, bold title and text graphics and an “interview” …

BAFICI, Day 6
By Robert Koehler

Fernando Solanas has appeared at BAFICI with the optimistic culmination of his trilogy of films examining the state of things past and present in Argentina–Dormant Argentina, in which he makes a lengthy, substantial argument that few countries in the Western Hemisphere are better prepared for a technological explosion. He extends the critique he delivered with fierce energy in his La dignidad de los nadies and Memoria del saqueo, that privitization and “neo-liberalism” has robbed Argentina of resources and talent, but that the country’s scientific, technological and labor base provides a strong …

Abasto Shopping Mall in Buenos Aires

BAFICI, Day 5
By Robert Koehler

Some additional thoughts on M˙sica nocturna….The film’s sense of comedy runs to such moments as a droll exchange between two of the characters, perambulating around the streets and finding themselves in a bookstore that’s actually closed but that they have somehow gotten into anyway, about how the Papacy in Rome has commissioned writers acquainted with Latin to devise new Latin terms for contemporary terms, like “hot pants.” It’s part of the film’s greater fabric, which is to ponder (in thoughtful and light ways) how the inheritance of …

The Island at the End of the World (2005)

BAFICI, Day 4
By Robert Koehler

Of the several “retros & focus” sections that BAFICI has organized this year–organizers swore to me weeks ago that they would trim down from last year’s bulging 15 or so retrospectives, but being true cinephiles, they simply couldn’t help themselves, and have arranged 19 for our viewing pleasure–I most want to catch the surveys of Luc Moullet, Malaysian filmmaker Ho Yuhang and 23-year-old Filipino artist Raya Martin. Now, 23 seems like an awfully young age to have a retrospective, but as I noted to Quintin …

Tout refleurit

BAFICI, Day 3
By Robert Koehler

Now that I’ve washed Kim Ki-duk right out of my hair, on to stuff that matters…like the fascinating co-mingling of life and death that I found yesterday running through AurÈlien Gerbault’s intriguing and personal portrait of Pedro Costa, Tout refleurit (whose English title, All Blossom Again, hints at some of the film’s innate optimism about the filmmaking process), Claire Simon’s engrossing and brave «a br˚le, and the final film from that greatest of filmmaking couples, Straub-Huillet, Quei loro encontri (whose title translates roughly as “Those They Encounter” and which I …