Argentina

Though an enquiry that is both personal and theoretical, MELISA LIEBENTHAL maps out her own past and present, as well as her family’s history through the usage of utilitarian images, such as Google Maps and aerial photos, whose limits she tries to transgress. Having a complex family background - a grandparent who migrated from a Germany that couldn’t accept his Jewish heritage, who arrives in China, where he gets married, and then leaves for South America again due to ethnic discrimination - Liebenthal gathers all these intimate histories, strongly tied to the political context of the 20th century and brings them together in a meta-cinematographic piece. Through HERE AND THERE, she traces a geographical space of the personal, keeping herself close, both physically - by using a voice-over and some spectaculous appearances in the images themselves - and emotionally, throughout the entire process. (Emil Vasilache, BIEFF 2020)

Dealing, like many of Marcelo Martinessi’s previous films, with the recent history of Paraguay, The Lost Voice is based on original interviews about the 2012 Curuguaty massacre which triggered political chaos and the removal of the acting president. The hand-held camera follows an old woman with a heavily creased face of awe-inspiring beauty through her daily chores. She is the mother of one of the victims. During her spoken recollections, the screen turns black as if showing respect, and the radio broadcast from the time of the massacre, a constant background sound throughout the film, cuts out. Shifting between speech and image and almost never allowing them to sync, the film evades the conventional interview format and functions much as memory itself, fragmentary and abounding in blind spots. The massacre itself is openly suggested only in one shaky shot of the frantic movements of panic-stricken chickens with gunshot sounds from the radio in the background. The rest is about the frightening calm after an - emotional and political - storm. (Ioana Florescu, BIEFF 2017)

Screened at IDFA Amsterdam, “(Self)exhibitions is a found footage documentary film made with home movies, that approaches to new forms of self-representation and exhibition of our intimacy on the internet and in social networks. Confessional and private experiences, turned public and exposed on the web, giving rise to new self-narratives that become part of a spontaneous circuit of imitations, recurrences and replies between web users, determining the way we show ourselves. The film is the final result of a series of short pieces (from 3 to 5 minutes) conceived for a video-installation.” (Festival Scope)

Each of the seven male escorts from MANUEL ABRĄMOVIĆ’s short documentary is confronted with the camera while simultaneously facing another task – listening to their own stories, told with their previously recorded own voices. This leads to often contradictory reactions. Be it amused, unimpressed or touched by his own story, each and every one of them is obviously intimidated by the camera. Men who have sex with men for money seem to be living with a sense of otherness. Neither queer nor with a ‘conforming’ sexual life, their status is marginal and they have been faceless. ABRĄMOVIĆ offers in his short film seven faces and many bits of account, questioning the role of the camera as a client and vice versa. (Călin Boto, BIEFF 2019)

In Cordoba of the late 80s, after the fall of the military dictatorship, the newly regained freedom of the LGBTQI+ community is decimated by the HIV-AIDS crisis. La Delpi, one of the few surviving drag queens of the scene, tells the bittersweet story of those years over VHS images, stopping on the image of La Colo - whose tragic end she reimagines, playing back reality. A time capsule that pays tribute to the struggles of the queer community and to its forms of resistance. (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020)