➢ The most radical section of the Festival will show four feature films and six short films in competition
➢ Four of the works, one feature film and three shorts, will premiere in Spain at the Gran-Canarian capital’s film event.
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Monday, March 27, 2023-. Bande à Part, the most radical and bold section of the Gran-Canarian capital’s quintessential film event, the International Film Festival, will bring in its twenty-second edition a selection of works outside the current mainstream that looks at the coming cinema of synthetic images. Film critic Antonio Weinrichter, one of the Festival’s hard core collaborators as well as one of the most veteran members of the Selection Committee, dives into four feature films and six short films that navigate within territories under exploration, a philosophy that sponsors and illustrates this competitive section.
The first title compiting for the 5,000-euro prize to its director is Skazka / Fairytale (Aleksander Sokurov, Russia, Belgium, 2022, 78 min.), a film that, with deepfake technology, according to Weinrichter’s text in the catalog, “is set in a foggy limbo where great dictators of the 20th century walk alongside Churchill, Christ and other illustrious deceased.”
One of the most important figures in cinema history, the Swiss Jean-Luc Godard, after whom the Bande à Part section is named, and the Iranian poet and filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan planned a meeting that never came to fruition. Sixty years later, Mitra Farahani, the female director of À vendredi, Robinson / See You Friday, Robinson (France, 2022, 96 min.), managed to make that appointment happen and turn it into an epistolary exchange of e-mails.
Argentine filmmaker Raúl Perrone’s “unprejudiced and uncompromising” look at his subjects, which, Weinrichter notes, sets him apart from conventional protest documentary, can be understood with Sean Eternxs (Argentina, 2022, 96 min.), “a group portrait of teenagers whose lives are not easy, a return to the world of the pibxs.”
The fourth feature-length film that resists to follow the mainstream and that premieres in Spain as part of the Festival, Home Invasion (United Kingdom, 2023, 91 min.), is based on a “prodigious handling of a range of archive materials that reaches sensory assault,” as the programmer points out in the text of the catalog. Filmmaker Graeme Arnfield’s work “is a compelling journey through technological and ideological issues whose starting point is the innocent invention of the intercom.”
For the film critic, the compact session of short pieces to be offered by Bande à Part “is a program that combines visual pleasure and cinema that is not necessarily narrative.” Generated by means of artificial intelligence, two short films have landed in this section: Statistical Hallucination (Spain, 2023, 12 min.), by Anna Giralt and Jorge Caballero, and The Artist In The Machine (Austria, 2022, 3 min.), by Claudia Larcher. About the former, which premieres in Spain as part of the Festival, Weinrichter points out that “an AI program transforms the text of its subtitles into synthetic images with a result that surprises and retains some of the magic of the original.” Regarding the second, he concludes that its female director “feeds an AI intelligence program capable of learning with her own collages. At first sight the image looks like an architectural façade, but it soon starts to undergo all kinds of mutations beyond human conception”.
Bloom (Spain, 2023, 18 min.) by Canarian filmmakers Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado “longs for the island of San Borondón and imagines this little Atlantis on the Tropic seamount, recently discovered 4,500 meters under the ocean.” Amarillo Atlántico / Atlantic Yellow (Spain, 2022, 14 min.) by Carla Andrade is a journey across the Galician Groba mountains “that seeks to summon up the spirits of a dreamed ancient tradition, prior to the Christian era.” Two exercises in “hallucinatory geography that evoke ancient worlds and hidden memories.”
Another Spanish premiere coming to the Festival is Flyby Kathy (Portugal, 2023, 11 min.). Its director Pedro Bastos “re-edits archive footage to evoke a closer kind of memory,” that of actress Kathy Harcourt who briefly worked in the porn industry only to disappear in 1981, “through obsessive processing of the last film in which she appeared.”
Finally, the piece Idade Óssea / Growing Pains – A Film in Seven Parts (Portugal, 2022, 20 min.) benefits from “a charming naive animation for an enigmatic narration with five voices”, an “infinite excavation that reveals time and its marks.” Its female director, Isabel Aboim, “mixes and blends the most diverse techniques, from traditional photography to stop motion,” resulting in “a genuine collage festival,” says Antonio Weinrichter. This short film will also be shown for the first time in the country as part of the Festival.
Bande à Part Jury
This selection of titles, which the Festival will bring to the attention of students from audiovisual schools, will be judged by a jury made up of Colombian film director, researcher and programmer Paula Rodríguez Polanco. Her films are closely related to her research work, where she investigates the materiality of the film in contemporary artistic practices and the relationship of the image with history and individual and collective memory. She is currently working on a PhD thesis on the aesthetics of Super 8 and 16mm practices in contemporary cinema and is in the development stage of her first fiction feature
The jury will count on the expertise of visual artist and filmmaker Claudia Claremi. Graduated in Documentary Film from the International Film School of San Antonio de los Baños (Cuba) and in Fine Arts from the University of the Arts London (UK) and the Instituto Superior de Arte de La Habana (Cuba), she has participated in alternative programmes of study and artistic production such as VISIO (Florence, Italy) and La Práctica (Beta Local, Puerto Rico). Her films have been screened and awarded at international film festivals such as Raindance, Ann Arbor, Ji.hlava, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Documenta Madrid, Márgenes, MiradasDoc, Lo Schermo dell’Arte, Vienna Shorts, Makedox, FIDBA, MIDBO, LOOP Barcelona, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, etc. Her work has also been exhibited at PHotoEspaña, La Casa Encendida, CA2M, Centre d’Art Fabra i Coats, Matadero, and BilbaoArte, among others.
Finally, Sergio Gomes, who since 2001 has collaborated with the International Short Film Festival Curtas Vila do Conde where he is currently a programmer, coordinator of the industry section and competitions, will be the third member of the jury in charge of awarding Bande à Part. Born in 1977 in Porto, Portugal. He studied Optoelectronics and Lasers at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto. Since 2001 he. Founding member of Porto/Post/Doc: Film & Media Festival – where he is right now the executive director and programmer.
Selection
The films that will compete for the Bande à Part award, financially endowed with €5,000 to the director, are:
Skazka / Fairytale, by Aleksander Sokurov (Russia, Belgium 2022, 78 min.)
À vendredi, Robinson / See You Friday, Robinson, by Mitra Farahani (France, 2022, 96 min.)
Sean Eternxs, by Raúl Perrone (Argentina, 2022, 96 min.)
Home Invasion, by Graeme Arnfield (United Kingdom, 2023, 91 min.)
Statistical Hallucination, by Anna Giralt and Jorge Caballero (Spain, 2023, 12 min.)
The Artist In The Machine, by Claudia Larcher (Austria, 2022, 3 min.)
Bloom, by Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado (Spain, 2023, 18 min.)
Amarillo Atlántico / Yellow Atlantic, by Carla Andrade (Spain, 2022, 14 min.)
Flyby Kathy, by Pedro Bastos (Portugal, 2023, 11 min.)
Idade Óssea, by Isabel Aboim (Portugal, 2022, 20 min.)
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