Antoine Leonetti
Coordinator Mostra FIRE!!
I shoot, therefore I exist …
Creativity for identity construction? This is the goal of many artists whose life condition do not allow them to inhabit this world quietly. To face a sexual identity against what is established often implies accumulating silences, resisting insults, pretending to be someone else, without being able to liberate desire and sensuality … It is feeling impotence in front of ignorance or open hostility, it is having to devise how to stay invisible in front of legal interdiction or even penitentiary repression. So many mood inflexibilities, urging to artistic expression as a way out. Because transforming discomfort in expressiveness, transmuting melancholy into illusion, converting still darkness into illustrated action, this is the objective of the creative act for those that feel that have to construct themselves.
Cinema, as a total art, represents in that sense the perfect media. Characters speak out for you, frames fix precisely your own eyes, color balance reflects your mood, action rhythm carries your desire, anger or determination… Chosen music gives that transcendence that you wanted to give to images … Unlimited resources capable to express all your frustrations, all your sadness and anger, but also all your fantasies, all your sensitivity, all your inspiration and all your art. These momentums of pure creation are found in the feature films of Fire!! 2009. Author sensitive voice is in the dimmed night lights of the cities in Vivere, in the dark and moving green of the Basque valleys, in Ander, or in the Israeli kitsch melodies of Japan Japan. Interior frames of La Casa de Alicia suggest the stifling ambience of the small flat of a big family where, all grownup, have to live in secret their desires and lies. In La ley del más fuerte, Fassbinder cynicism is expressed contrasting loud colors of a funfair with the absurd decoration of bourgeois apartments… Extreme refinement of photography is also the perfect vehicle to transmit emotions in Las hijas del botanista and the claustrophobic atmosphere reflects without pity, anxiety and guilt in the movies of Agustí Villaronga… Films from creators, whose sensitivity will be transmitted surely to you. They are telling you: Create! Truly, you live better…
"Ander"
Director: Roberto Castón
Producers: José María Gonzalo, Fernando Díez y Roberto Castón
Cast: Josean Bengoetxea, Christhian Esquivel, Mamen Ribera,
Leire Ucha, Pilar Rodríguez, Pako Revueltas.
Feature film, Fiction, Spain, 2009
128 min
Premiere in Barcelona
Synopsis:
"Ander" is the first film with a homosexual theme to be filmed in Basque and its value lies not in the story of a
conflictive homosexual relationship in a rural setting in current times, but also and above all in its brutal portrait
of a traditional and humble family, their customs, secrets and lack of communication. It is a portrait of the
character of a closed society, fearful of progress and incapable of showing affection. It is a difficult setting in
which to build an affectionate and sexual relationship between a working man from the depths of the Basque Country and a
Peruvian immigrant who arrives in the village to make a new life. The realism of the emotions of the characters and the
serene and profound photography do the rest; it is a unique film in Spanish cinema.
"Japan Japan"
Director: Lior Shamriz
Producer: Lior Shamriz
Cast: Imri Kahn, Tal Meiri, Irit Gidron
Feature film, Fiction, Israel 2007
65 min
Premiere in Barcelona
Synopsis:
"Japan Japan" is one of the most refreshing films of the
Mostra 2009. It is a piece of work without pretensions,
strange and provocative with an innovative and ground-breaking language, not only in the way it is
filmed but also in the narrative times used, the shots and the original dialogues
which are mainly improvised. Made with a risible
budget, this is the first film by the young Israeli director
Lios Shamriz, in which one literally does not know what
is going to happen next.
The film, made mainly in Tel Aviv, speaks of an apparently trivial theme, i.e. the aimless life of a drifting adolescent obsessed with Japan and the imagery of Internet porn, his sexual encounters, his surrealist flatmate, the mundane experiences of his life in the city and the wild passing of the days; however, beneath all this we find a fascinating perspective on the life of a real lazybones and a political and social critique of modern-day Israel.
"Les Filles du botaniste"
Directed by: Sijie Dai
Performed by: Lior Shamriz
Cast: Mylène Jampanoï, Li Xiao Ran, Ling Dong Fu, Wei-chang Wang
Feature Film, Fiction, France, Canada, 2006
105 min
Premiere in Barcelona
Synopsis:
"Les Filles du botaniste" introduces a story with a fantastic plastic beauty turning around a dramatic axis composed by a famous
botanist -a mysterious man and authoritarian father living in an isle transformed in a luxurious garden-, his daughter
An and Min, a young orphan girl that gets to the isle to study and share her life with this lonely couple set back from
the World.
China of the eighties still had some taboos. These taboos are stressed when between the two young girls a link is created and little by little changes into a worrying and forbidden sexual attraction. Imagination and Desire will do the rest, setting up a plan that will allow them to live under the same roof forever.
"A casa de Alice"
Directed by: Chico Teixeira
Produced by: Patrick Leblanc, Zita Carvalhosa
Performed by: Carla Ribas, Berta Zemel, Zécarlos Machado, Vinicius Zinn, Ricardo Vilaça
Feature Film, Fiction, Brasil, 2007
90 min
Premiere in Barcelona
Synopsis:
The new brazilian cinema approaches social and costumbrist realism from many points of view. "A casa di Alice" is one of
the best examples. Plot’s pulse and emotion doesn’t lie in the main characters themselves or their dialogs but in the
visual description, detailed and harsh of the daily settings. Alice is a worker woman in her forties, married to a taxi
driver twenty years ago, with three adolescent sons living together with her mother in a little flat in a worker suburb
of Sao Paulo. A woman surrounded by men, a couple in crisis, a ramshackle family and at the centre of this universe,
sexual pulsation floods everything.
A valiant, simple, hyperrealistic and independent play.
"Soundless wind chime"
Director: Kit Hung
Production: Jacqueline Liu, Liliane Ott, Min Li Marti, Philip Delaquis, Stefan Zuber
Cast: Lu Yulai, Bernhard Bulling, Marie Omlin, Gilles Tschudi, Ruth Schwegler, Li Wai Foon, Wong Siu Yin
Feature Film, fiction, China, 2008
100 min
Premiere in Spain
Synopsis:
"Soundless wind chime" is probably the more lyric and poetic movie of the Mostra 2009, a subtle and dreamlike exercise
where words are in second term and leave space to gestures and sensuality. Ricky’s inner journey searching memories and
past of his lover Pascal. A collection of gestures, illusions, silent fights to keep love alive in ordinary life.
Ricky, Chinese immigrant foreigner in his own country and Pascal, a Swiss escaping from tradition borders in his culture, meet in Hong Kong and tell us a story of a relationship built in the dilemma of mutual dependence and real love, fear of loneliness and inside sorrow due to displacement and lack of roots, all in an hostile environment, an adverse social and economic reality and a feeling of mortal remoteness.
An underground cross between Won Kar-Wai’s "Happy together" and Sofia Coppola’s "Lost in translation".
"Vivere"
Director: Angelina Maccarone
Production: Anita Elsani.
Cast: Hannelore Elsner, Esther Zimmering, Kim Schnitzer.
Feature film, Fiction, Germany, 2006
97 min
Premiere in Barcelona
Synopsis:
German film director Angelica Maccarone has achieved in the past years a solid and respected movie career based on her
subtlety to speak about women feelings, women in love with women. It's the case of her last movie, a road movie
with three women on the run, three women running away from their ghosts, a run to save one another, and to save
themselves.
The day before Christmas, Francesca’s small sister, Antonietta, escapes to Rotterdam with her musician boyfriend. On her way to find her, Francesca picks up Gerlinde, a woman sick of suicidal love. Now she has two lifes to save. On the journey of the three souls in crisis lost in Rotterdam, it’s difficult to know who is going to save who.
EXPERIMENTAL SESSION
"The Lollipop Generation"
Director: GB Jones
Production: GB Jones
Cast: Jena von Brücker, Mark Ewert, Vaginal Davis
Feature film, Fiction, Canada, 2008
70 min
Premiere in Spain
Synopsis:
G.B. Jones, collaborator of the iconoclast director Bruce La Bruce, is considered as one of initiators of the queer punk
movement in USA at the end of the 80’s, multidisciplinary activist that has used his songs, fanzines, shorts films and
performances as manifestos of sexual, social and aesthetic nonconformity. "The Lollipop Generation" is his first feature
film, shot during thirteen years on Super 8 using tools of traditional home movie to make a generation portrait without
concessions.
Go-getters, common criminals, hustlers, pornographs, exhibitionists, lolitas with lollipops and other gangs follow the erratic life of a runaway teenager, in a experimental movie that explains a journey with epileptic frames of documentary ugliness that reach the essence of the punkest underground cinema giving sense to the philosophy of "do it yourself". Remarkable participation from the American underground queer movement superstars such as Jena von Brücker, Calvin Johnson, Mark Ewert, or Joel Gibb and an extraordinary and nowadays soundtrack y actual from groups such as The Hidden Cameras, Anonymous Boy and the Abominations or Bunny and the Lakers.
CLASIC SESSION
"Faustrech der freiheit"
Direction: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Production: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cast: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Peter Chantel, Karlheinz Böhm, Adrian Hoven, Christiane Maybach, Harry Baer
Feature film, Fiction, Germany, 1974
123 min
Synopsis:
Fassbinder is one of the authors most rebellious and controversial in the German cinema history, and he achieved disdain
not only from the cultural elite but also of his own homosexual community. This film, "The law of the stronger", as
happened with "Petra von Kant" was very criticized by homosexuals, who appeared as conceited beings, quite silly,
narcissistic and even exotic. Fassbinder never used homosexuality as a cause which had to be defended or in which it had
to militate. In that sense, the critic Andrew Britton sustained in the English magazine "Gay Left" that "The law
of the stronger" presents a vision of homosexuality which denigrates all of us. Therefore, we should denounce it with
energy. During all his life, the director defended that direct or indirect homosexual topics in his films were merely an
accessory fact, that he was only interested in human relationships, not its different factions. In addition, there is
not one single frame in all his works exalting or victimizing the homosexual problematic, since Rainer always put it on
the same level as for any straight couple that appeared in his films. "hose who boast of his sexual condition, they
end up in self-pity and dominated by his feelings of shame" (Rainer Werner Fassbinder).
“The law of the stronger” is one of the most emblematic and diffused films directed by Fassbinder in which he also played the main character. In this film, he takes a look over the economical-cultural exploitation and exploitation of feelings in a relationship. Franz is an ordinary young homosexual, candid and easy-going that, after working in a fair, earns half million of marks in lottery, that allows him to be introduced in the best and most exquisite gay circles, knowing and falling in love with Eugen, the son of a businessman owner of a printer on the verge of a bankruptcy.
A selfish relationship is established with an unbalance among who gives and who manipulates, that leading to a dramatic ending of total destruction. This wonderful and hard film has rested as the most fierce and intense example from this director about power in relationships, which end transforming the one who loves more in a victim and being amazing the impressive clarity to expose repression and exploitation mechanisms among Franz and Eugen, as well as the disturbing and unstoppable dramatic progression that can only end in tragedy.
