Various – Visións. Creadoras de cinema: Pontevedra AKA Visions. Cinema’s creators: Pontevedra (2016)
“Visions” is a collaborative film that consists of ten short films made by female filmmakers from the province of Pontevedra. Ten genuine glimpses into which cinema and art merge into intimate, polyhedral production.
Eva Calvar, Sonia Méndez, Olaia Sendón, Claudia Brenlla, Andrea Zapata-Girau, Begoña M. Santiago, Carme Nogueira, Lara Bacelo, Diana Toucedo and Carla Andrade participated in this collective project.
With a grant of 1,300 euros for each short, these creators had two months to design and finish their pieces. In addition to being the directors have been responsible for the cameras and editing, and this ability to make a film from beginning to end with their own hands, on a tight budget, marks as a scar the cinema they practice.
With Visións ten female directors converses, created, felt part of a common project and became aware of what unites them, to create a multifaceted full-length film full of honesty and poetry.
Following an initial promotion of the project, the work by Eva Calvar is the prelude of Visións. In Proxectar-se (Project yourself) Eva uses the projector as a fascinating device that caresses her friend’s body. Proxectar-se is an invocation to the matter, to the origin of life, to movement, to des- truction, or it may be the expression of the pro- cess of the artist’s transformation into a woman.
In the film 1⁄2 by Olaia Sendón a woman reflects on the reasons for not having made a declared feminist cinema before. She ends the film crying out, a gesture of tiredness against the low intensity male chauvinism that also affects women. It is a call to raise awareness.
Sonia Méndez presents a daring 6 minutes long take of a street full of restlessness; the camera is a man that follows insistently a woman (the author herself), catcalling and harassing her to attract her attention. At first, he does not sound aggressive, but the chase and the lack of respect for private space makes the scene violent. Sonia deals with this normalized sexism that every woman has felt at some point in her life.
In Ambos mundos Claudia Brenlla managed to create an original archival film, a process and metalanguage film. This is a self-portrait of her- self in the editing room facing her collection of travel images. This is a deep travelogue, with a light and humorous touch, which conveys the poetry of a fragmen- ted essay of autobiographical cinema.
Aava, by Andrea Zapata-Girau, takes us to Finland, where she lived. A theatre artist usually drops her young child off her grandmother’s home until she comes back from work, sometimes really late. This is a beautifully executed film, where she manages to convey the most subtle and restrained emotions in the relationship between Aava’s mother and the paternal grand- mother. An encouraging example of a kind of cinema that is only possible after having experienced the diaspora.
Lara Bacelo approaches cinema as a visceral poetic experience. In the film Aquí dentro (He- rein) we penetrate the wounds of her life through voice messages sent by friends and also through images filmed in a house whose walls show the passage of time. Using a personal script this director combines lyrical reflection and letters from friends with the contemplation of beauty in her daily life.
Begoña Santiago comes from Fine Arts, interdisciplinary visual artist, specialized in the use of light as pictorial and sculptural tool (video mapping), takes us to Berlin, where she cu- rrently lives. The artist opens an album on a table in the courtyard in a district in Berlin. Through a family photograph of six women –Begoña herself with her sister, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmo- ther–, by using the zoom, she makes a quick review of the family archive, which at the same time represents more than half a century’s jour- ney through the history of Galicia.
Carme Nogueira, a multidisciplinary artist, with the film Voguing works in line with her Guided Tours, urban actions in specific places that invite us to reconsider the construction of citizens and landscape, language in context. Here we are in a busy street with people coming and going, we listen to the voice of the artist, repeatedly reciting a text, which is an excerpt from Paris is burning (1990), a book on ball culture (ballroom circuit) in the New York of the 80s. This film is a review on the supremacy of white men, which recalls the importance of the performative act to create concepts such as race, gender or sexuality.
At this stage ofthe film, we are far away from the narrative logic of cause and effect. Diana Toucedo, a director with a sig- nificant experience as an editor, chose to make a found footage work of her own based on the work Límite (Limit) by Mario Peixoto. Toucedo manages to create a distressing visual landscape and soundscape with psychological strength. This is a proposal of re-editing that turns a Brazilian film of the 20s into a very personal and precise artistic work, focusing on editing as the author’s main tool.
The work Visións is brought to a close with Carla Andrade’s film, Listen to me. This is a painstaking production that explores the contemplative and dreamlike world of the author herself, who is mainly known as a photographer.
The result of all these short films is a polyedric but consistent film, a feature film made up of several pieces that also work as independent short films, but when they are put together gain in importante and and interest. All together are the sum that represents the talent of a place, and flatly claim a place for the “cinema of small nations”, in this case Galicia, an area even with a marked minority nature when we refer to women’s cinema.
(text by curator Xisela Franco)
This is part of the New Galician Cinema Wave
Visions.Cinema's.creators.Pontevedra.1080p.WEBRip.AAC.x264.RIYE.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1h 11mn
Size: 1.94 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 1920x1080
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Frame rate: 25.000 fps
Bit rate: 3 660 Kbps
BPP: 0.071
Audio
#1: 2.0ch AAC @ 256 Kbps
Language(s):Galician, Spanish, Various
Subtitles:English (hard)
