Film Journey

Raya Martin’s Autohystoria

BAFICI, Day 11
By Robert Koehler

What does a film culture look like? Is it even apparent when it materializes in a certain place, a certain country? Even more important, when it disappears in a certain place, a certain country, does anyone notice?

The issues around this circulate in the context of BAFICI in Argentina (which has some kind of film culture), particularly as it is showing the films of Raya Martin from the Phillippines (which supposedly had no film culture). It centers on a community, and the crucial matter that a local film culture simply doesn’t …

BAFICI, Day 10
By Robert Koehler

The public nature of film festivals is getting steadily mitigated by where they’re located. This dawned on me today crossing the extremely busy Avenida Corrientes, one of Buenos Aires’ major boulevards and traditionally the home to the city’s many Broadway-style theaters and cultural institutions, such as the Centro Cultural San Martin where the Lugones cinematheque is located (and immortalized in both Adolfo Aristarain’s Roma and Lisandro Alonso’s Fantasma). My hotel is located directly across the street from the Abasto shopping center, where BAFICI is primarily based. Instantly, the moment you stick your head …

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 …