Sunday 17 May 2015

A frantic few days bouncing from screening to screening a real mix of films. Have managed to clock up 15 films - 18 if you count the shorts! Some real highlights among the quite substantial Latin American offering on show here. Really impressive films include the following (n.b. my new star ratings! 0-5 where five is tops):

*****El abrazo de la serpiente / Embrace of the serpent (Dir. Ciro Guerra, Colombia 2015) - part of the Festival's Quinzaine des Realisateurs and with the bonus of a q&a with the director and actors after the screening. A beautifully shot drama in black and white, the film presents the intersecting stories of two western scientists travelling in the north-western Amazon in search of knowledge and understanding of the plants, healing and spiritual powers nurtured and preserved by its indigenous people. Their respective journeys (4 decades apart) and their profound learning experience in the company of the enigmatic Keramakate deliver a challenging engagement with the consequences of religious, political and economic colonisation and compel reflection on their moral, ecological and cultural impact. As the director pointed out, the black and white palette constitutes a metaphor for the limited experience of the essence of life to be gained through human senses alone. In the ancestral indigenous cultures of Keramakate's people potent plants and their hallucinatory powers are a fundamental part of the ritual and spiritual life, a catalyst for achieving heightened insight and spiritual communion with the essence of life. See Hollywood Reporter Cannes review. See trailer.

*****Allende, mil abuelo Allende / Beyond my grandfather Allende (Dir. Marcia Tambutti, Chile, Mexico 2015) See trailer - also part of the Festival's Quinzaine des Realisateurs and with the bonus of a q&a with the director after the screening. Marcia Tambutti's documentary focuses on her quest to understand the grandfather she never knew and his curiously silent presence in the family's memories and emotions. Images form the backbone of this journey of discovery as she pieces together glimpses and teases out fond, uncomfortable and painful recollections and reflections from family members - her own generation of siblings and cousins, her mother and aunt and Allende's widow Hortensia (La Tencha) who died during the making of the film at the age of 95. Assembling this intimate collage of Allende within the family inevitably simultaneously examines their experience of the drama and tragedy of the 11 September 1973 coup - Allende's death and the subsequent experiences of repression, exile and loss.  The power of the image not only to capture moments in time but to act as a catalyst for questioning and reflecting on the past is central to the film. Tambutti does not shy away from representing the dilemma such a project presents - the need to recuperate silenced memories but also the sense of intrusion and pain that their retrieval represents (anxieties about this are frankly exposed in the filmed interviews with family members, especially in relation to interviewing La Tencha), but the film compellingly demonstrates the cathartic effect of the project on the family. A fascinating and moving film.

More in the next post.......