The first days of the 17th Mostra de Cinema Periférico have confirmed the vitality of avant-garde cinema, creating great expectations for events over the festival’s main days in a packed programme.
World premiere Descubro el rayo, tus ojos tiemblan, de Guillermo Braga. PHOTOS: Andrea R. and A. Morandeira.
“A unique experience.” “I felt like a particle in the universe.” “It was very intense, the image, the sound and above all the body of the artist; you could feel it present.” These were some of the reflections of the more than a hundred people who seized the chance to attend Jeanne Liotta’s screening to inaugurate the 17th Mostra de Cinema Periférico A Coruña last Tuesday. Its title, Path of Totality, made perfect sense, since it refers to the swathe with the best visibility for observing a total eclipse like the one we will experience in Galicia next August. Until then, the interplay of light appearing and disappearing will belong to the cinema dreamed up by more than eighty artists presenting their works in this (S8). Some have already done so, and this is what we have experienced.
Opening special sesion in Filmoteca.
INTERNATIONAL PERSONALITIES
The (S8) festival is like a cinematic jolt, where just as you’ve decided that a film is the most breathtaking or poetic or unique thing you’ve ever seen, the next one begins and you’ve already changed your mind. That was the one. Or the next one. Until it all makes sense as a whole. Each programme is the result of the meticulous work of curating that the programming team carries out every year. And not only them. This time, behind Bruno Varela’s programmes there was the perspective of Bryan Davies, who meticulously planned an emotional attack straight to the audience’s gut, also making use of live music by Chago and Che Garrido, from Colapso Colectivo, who he accompanied on bass.
Bruno Varela with Chago and Che Garrido during the projection. Down with Byron Davies.
It took several hours for the impact of Bruno Varela’s struct-rural cinema to settle down, giving way to another texture, a visual experience that was both mechanical and abstract. That was what Els van Riel’s programme promised, and she did not disappoint. Layer after layer, her films reveal unsuspected nuances in what is seemingly banal, but only perceptible in the details when projected in their original analogue format, which is something that for (S8) is more than a commitment; it is practically the festival’s raison d’être. And that is the case for many reasons, but this year one stands out above the rest: if they were not projected in Super, 8 we could never have seen John Porter’s films.
The audience knew that a session by the Canadian “King of Super 8” with himself in the hall interacting with the projection was a unique opportunity. Hence, the queue outside the Filmoteca de Galicia started forming an hour earlier, though it was certainly worthwhile for those who managed to get a place. There is only one copy of Porter’s films, which in this session included works filmed between 1976 and 2016, and that is the one he projects himself, introducing the content and transmitting the same contagious, playful spirit in each shot. It is both playful and radical, since even on this occasion he did not allow any digital record of his images to remain. One-off, indeed.
Els van Riel, John Porter and public from Filmoteca.
THE CINEMA OF THE FUTURE
Is analogue cinema undergoing a revolution? Yes. Otherwise, can someone explain the diversity, experimentation, seeking and breaking up of conventions that we’ve found in the Sinais programmes? They are unprejudiced proposals made over the past two years in Galicia, Spain and Portugal, where analogue quality implies not only the format, but also the perspective, the process. There are young filmmakers who came to the festival’s theatres not only to teach, but to discover, to meet each other and to weave a network of complicity concerning a shared passion. And they do so putting their bodies on the line, as Pablo Agma and Guillermo Braga did, the stars on the first night of Desbordamientos, also in Sinais. Because if analogue is becoming increasingly popular, so is performative cinema, created live.
The cherry on top for this first part of (S8) was given by Los Caballos de Düsseldorf, prolonging their closure of Desbordamientos Sinais with an implacable and very playful sound show. Now, two more days lie ahead of cutting-edge art, emotions, and ideas in the form of experimental cinema. Get ready.
Pablo Agma and Los Caballos de Dusseldörf.
