November 14: The link above leads to the Spanish-language homepage for the 24th edition of the Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia, which took place this year in the Chilean seaside city of Valdivia from October 9th through 15th. The festival’s English-language homepage can be found here.
I was pleased to attend the festival as a member of the three-person jury for the Official Latin American Short Film Selection, together with the French programmer Agnès Wildenstein (of DocLisboa) and the Bolivian filmmaker Carlos Piñeiro (of the collective Socavón Cine). We awarded the competition’s chief prize to a beautiful Colombian film called Palenque and a special mention to a fine Argentinian film called Niebla (aka Fog). I reprint below, both in Spanish and in English, the jury’s justifications for its decisions:
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Español: Primero queremos agradecer al FICValdivia
por invitarnos, ha sido una linda experiencia. La Selección Oficial
Cortometraje Latinoamericano es un buen ejemplo de la diversidad de propuestas
cinematográficas que el mismo género de cortometraje ofrece.
Por la belleza de un gesto puramente cinematográfico y por la ser la representación de un momento único y sencillo a orillas del mar, el Premio Especial de Jurado va para la película Niebla, de Flavia de la Fuente.
El premio a Mejor Cortometraje va para un film con una mirada auténtica, por su increíble cambio de personajes y por una edición grandiosa. Un lugar especial se muestra a través de temas que tocan la vida y la muerte acompañados de un magnífico ritmo musical en Palenque, de Sebastián Pinzón Silva.
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English: We would like to begin by thanking FICValdivia for inviting us this year. It has been a beautiful experience. The Official Latin American Short Film Selection gives a good example of the diversity of cinematic proposals that the short form offers.
For the beauty of its purely cinematographic gesture and for its representation of a unique and lovely moment at the seashore, the Special Jury Prize goes to the film Niebla, directed by Flavia de la Fuente.
The Best Short Film prize goes to a film with an authentic gaze, incredible shifts of character, and graceful editing. A special place is shown through motifs of life and death and through the constant rhythm of music in Palenque, directed by Sebastián Pinzón Silva.
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A listing of highlights throughout FICValdivia’s other sections this year would soon grow tedious. Suffice to say that the more one looks through the festival’s catalogue and website, the more that one will likely discover.
I spent most of my viewing time in the Sala Paraninfo, which specialized in attentive 16mm projection. Among the experiences there for which I was grateful were screenings of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant and five films directed by Deborah Stratman. My greatest sense of discovery in Paraninfo - and, in fact, in the festival - came from the spectacular evening of two programs of Japanese experimental films called “La Gran Ola de Tokio” (”The Great Tokyo Wave”), especially Takahiko Iimura’s On Eye Rape and Kohei Ando’s trilogy of works collectively titled Like a Passing Train.
16mm is a delicate art, and good 16mm screenings should be cherished. So, for that matter, should good-quality 8mm, 35mm, and 70mm projections, as well as good-quality DCP and ProRes screenings. Among FICValdivia’s virtues is how it continues to care for screenings in different formats - both analogue and digital - with the understanding that a support is not only a kind of material, but also a form of expression.