Ángel Santos
Galicia is one, but it seems to split into many due to the multiple voices and areas that its cinematographic panorama offers, a panorama which we perceive through the annual tour of Sinais en curto. It seems that curiosity and exploration guided the steps of Galician cinema, being also the short medium a fertile ground to give full rein to the manifestations that come out of that way of thinking and doing. From veteranry and knowledge to youth and discovery, Sinais en curto works as a varied catalog of samples of the most recent production.
In this year’s selection, we travel from formal experiments with found footage, to portraiture, hallucinated fiction, and reality records from unusual points of view, bordering on the surreal. Visions with a clear formal vocation and an untransferable artistic vision, which speak eloquently of these excited creative forces.
The filmmaker, critic and theorist Alberte Pagán shows a film studio from 35mm material, in an allegorical and frenetic collage made frame by frame. A mosca takes trailers of 35 mm commercial films in a work that affects, in his own words, the “impossibility of reconstruction after disintegration: a hybrid monster is born”. A reflection very according to the structural concerns of the rest of Mostra’s schedule.
The young sisters from Ferrol Noa and Lara Castro, just 19 years old, show an unusual talent in the field of moving images with their hypnotic and meaningful impossible Pezas. Taking a turn from the associative montage of O ollo cobizoso, which we saw last year at the festival, Pezas imposibles grabs the force of an underwater image, relying on the internal movement of the shot generated by an allegorical choreography in which questions in constant mutation as intimacy and identity are obliquely addressed.
Ángel Santos, author of the award-winning fiction feature, Las altas presiones, returns to the field of non-fiction to present a portrait of the painter from Pontevedra, Manuel Moldes, which reflects in 16mm on the intimacy of the act of creation and its public counterpart, starting with the retrospective exhibition Manuel Moldes – Pontevedra Suite (1982-1987), curated by Ángel Cerviño and coordinated by Alberto González-Alegre for the Museum of Pontevedra. A patient look inside and outside. The solitude and the elastic time of work at the studio, and the appearance of an exhibition, a foreign land that the painter manages to make his own in the only possible way: through the act of painting.
Helena Girón and Samuel Delgado, emergent international voices of experimental cinema (who have already toured festivals such as New York, Toronto or Rotterdam, among many others) will be present with their latest creation, Plus Ultra, in which Canarias becomes the scenario of a fable about the territory. Filmed in 16mm and processed by hand, the film achieves (as other powerful works of the duo) to emerge a story of the darkness of time and celluloid, as unearthed, in a dual direction of revelation and mystery preservation.
Sinais in curto concludes with Fogos, which brings together art and science with Marcos Pérez, technical director of the Casa de las Ciencias in A Coruña, and Martin Pawley, critic, programmer and film producer (Costa da Morte, 2013). A record of some fireworks from the pyrotechnic point of view that offers a hypnotic and unusual vision of a visual spectacle that has much to do with the history of experimental cinema itself. In the words of its directors, “a film that offers us the pure pleasure of looking and listening, the very essence of the arts and sciences of cinema”.
