Mexico

Addressing ethical issues of authenticity and creative ownership, EL ADIOS LARGOS playfully restores the opening scene of the (supposedly) only surviving print (a black and white, truncated, Spanish dubbed version) of Robert Altman’s classic, The Long Goodbye. Andrew Lampert's self-declared "painstaking restoration" sees the protagonist’s nocturnal ride to the supermarket becoming a psychedelic somnambulist’s trip. The characters float within a cinematic space, where analogue and digital artefacts playfully deconstruct the mise-en-scene, blotches of paint transforming the black-and-white space into a surreal carnival of color. A mischievous cinematic (re)reading that purposefully gets lost in the process, down the rabbit-hole. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF).

The venerated filmmaker Eisenstein is comparable in talent, insight and wisdom, with the likes of Shakespeare or Beethoven; there are few - if any - directors who can be elevated to such heights. On the back of his revolutionary film Battleship Potemkin, he was celebrated around the world, and invited to the US. Ultimately rejected by Hollywood and maliciously maligned by conservative Americans, Eisenstein traveled to Mexico in 1931 to consider a film privately funded by American pro-Communist sympathizers, headed by the American writer Upton Sinclair. Eisenstein's sensual Mexican experience appears to have been pivotal in his life and film career - a significant hinge between the early successes of Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October, which made him a world-renowned figure, and his hesitant later career with Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible and The Boyar's Plot. (written by Peter Greenaway)

Set in Mexico during the '10 days that shook' Russia’s greatest silent filmmaker, Eisenstein in Guanajuato marks Peter Greenaway’s raucous attempt to capture his all-time cinema idol at his moment of greatest personal discovery and deepest professional frustration — which, the film takes great delight in suggesting, coincided with the loss of his virginity, at age 33, so far from his (still) homophobic homeland. Determined to breathe fresh life into a medium he insists has scarcely evolved in the 90 years since Sergei Eisenstein made Strike, Greenaway has wrought an outrageously unconventional and deliriously profane biopic that could take decades to be duly appreciated. (Peter Debruge, Variety)

Erotically charged and artfully crafted, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is the first of two titles devoted to portions of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s life, and proves Peter Greenaway has lost none of his edge. At the age of 72, British auteur filmmaker maintains his ability to amaze. Ever the provocative experimentalist, he belongs to a rare class of director, one who manages to delight and confound, challenge and dismay even into his later period of film making. There’s a perverse thrill to be had watching the daringness on display in this examination of a Russian legend that bluntly examines his sexual orientation in a way that would never be produced from his native country. (Nicholas Bell, ioncinema.com)

How does a city of 20 million people cope with an antiquated sewage system at risk of daily mass flooding due to the accumulated refuse? The answer is deep-sea diver and gonzo-Jacques Cousteau Julio César cú Cámara, who for the past 30 years has immersed himself in the terra fluida of Mexico City to unclog the sewer passageway of society’s detritus. Under Esteban Arrangoiz’ direction, Julio’s story transcends its social utility by submerging us past grainy Super 16mm images of abstracted landscapes of garbage into an unseen, silent realm. For us and Julio, each dive becomes a ritualistic act that plunges him in an altered state of consciousness among the unknown of darkness and miscellanea. Carrying itself with the wide-eyed fascination of a Jules Verne story, The Diver is a captivating portrait of a social worker’s metaphysical pilgrimage. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016)