Venice at Home – Day 4: Politics & Portraiture

by Cláudio Alves

With the fourth day of festivities, conversations about who's a contender for the Golden Lion start to blossom here and there. While the critical response hasn't been unanimous, Laura Poitras' All the Beauty and the Bloodshed could be a future prizewinner. Speaking of Venetian trophies, the last time Andrea Pallaoro competed, Charlotte Rampling won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. His new film, Monica, has elicited muted responses, but hope is everlasting for its impressive cast led by Trace Lysette and Patricia Clarkson. Finally, Argentina, 1985 reunites director Santiago Mitre with actor Ricardo Darín for a prestigious historical drama that will get its streaming premiere on Amazon Prime Video this October.

For this project's purpose, let's remember when Poitras met Snowden, when Pallaoro led Rampling to Venice gold, and Mitre's first time directing Darín… 

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Review: The Great Movement

by Cláudio Alves

In 2016, Bolivian director Kiro Russo took his first feature to Locarno, where the Jury for the Golden Peacock presented him with a special Centenary Award for Best Debut Film. Dark Skull was an exercise in modern Neorealism, reinventing that movement from Italian cinema to a Latin American setting and deep-rooted specificity. More in line with the operatic myth of Visconti's La Terra Trema than with De Sica's urban melodramas, the film followed Elder's return to his desolate hometown upon his father's death. With the patriarch fallen, the son takes on his work, going into the mines like those before him. Those shadowy realms become the entrails of a cavernous titan through the gaze of Russo's camera, the industrial work shattered into a nightmare by mad editing, expressionist sound.

Underrated and under-discussed, Dark Skull was a tremendous triumph, and The Great Movement follows in its steps. Only this time, instead of Italian and German influence, Russo seems to be exploring the possibilities of Soviet montage and social realism, retrofitted as a new cinema for a new world…

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Sundance: In 'Utama,' home is where you die

by Cláudio Alves

Before he became a film director, Alejandro Loayza Grisi was a still photographer. Looking at his debut feature, Utama, it's easy to see the remnants of a photographer's sensibility, now transmuted into cinematic storytelling. Along with DP Barbara Alvarez, Grisi has framed the Bolivian highlands as a presence more important than any human. The cliché of the landscape being a character is not only present but transcended, to the point that the natural vistas become something of a cosmic deity. They're titan-like, cracked earth making up a wrinkled visage. The river is its mouth, once a gaping maw spewing life. Nowadays, it's just the sliver of a grimace, growing thinner, drying into oblivion.

This land is dying, and so are its people…

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Sundance: The elegiac poetry of 'Dos Estaciones'

by Cláudio Alves

Director Juan Pablo González comes from a family of tequila makers in the Jalisco highlands of Mexico. Though never outright stated, such biographical details inform in his fiction feature debut. Dos Estaciones is a love letter to the region and the noble artisanship of making tequila de old-fashioned way, from the azure expansions of the agave fields to the shiny glass bottle. However, it's also a eulogy, a cry of mourning for a dying world. Foreign pressures threaten the long history of the land, buying the fields and factories from families who've owned them for generations. A Mexican tradition thus becomes an American commodity, and there's little to do but honor what's lost, show people its value, its intrinsic beauty, resist through art and remembering…

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Sundance: 'Mars One' is a Brazilian gem!

by Cláudio Alves

Looking over the city she calls home, Tércia lingers and, in turn, the camera lingers on her. It's a beautiful, if humble, image, her silhouette against a celestial painting. The twilight sun makes watercolors out of the skyline, yellow bleeding into blue, gray buildings falling into the cold penumbra. The contemplative frame can contain many meanings, and director Gabriel Martins doesn't force the audience's hand. We're free to surmise what we want from the picture. Speaking from a personal place, I couldn't help but feel a melancholic kinship. Maybe it's projection, but I recognized myself in Tércia, looking at a seemingly peaceful world I thought I knew until it proved me wrong...

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