Today is the closing day of our festival. Our celebration of cinema, however, goes on until Sunday, as all the online contents we’ve been streaming throughout the week have been made available for the general public today at 8 am. Our sessions today will also be dual, with on-site activities that will be streamed for those who couldn’t join us in A Coruña. Click here to know all the details. Our Sinais section will welcome Adrián Canoura, whose pieces will be on show both online and in the movie theatre. The day will close with a performance by Miwa Matreyek that will be physically projected on several walls of A Coruña. At the same time and thanks to our online platform, it will come to life on the screens of our viewers, all over the world.
Our first protagonist, Adrián Canoura, is a Galician artist born in Burela, whose works offer a reinterpretation of traditional ethnographic films. To achieve this, he subjects his footage to multiple aesthetic manipulations, working with analogue video and sometimes combining it with the use of digital devices. Today, we offer different paths –online and on-site– to approach the multifaceted work of this versatile artist. Both paths, along which you’ll encounter many performative elements, will allow you to know Canoura better. The on-site session will include a live light show accompanied with music by Guerrera. And, if you watch the online program, you’ll have the opportunity to see Canoura improvising live with a video synthesizer. As a complement to Canoura’s sessions, we recommend you this interview with the author (text in Spanish) by Brais Romero Suárez that was published in A cuarta parede.
Another highlight of today’s on-site program is our Secret Gardens session, where, with a collection of floral and botanic films, we conjure the lost spring that’s at the heart of this year’s edition, expanding it to an exploration of the psyche’s secret gardens. The session starts on an “earthly” note with Julieta Aberbuj’s Plantas trepadoras –a film where a 16mm film strip is planted in a 35mm film strip– followed by Stan Brakhage’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, created by pasting flowers and herbs are pasted onto strips of clear film leader. Then, Rose Lowder’s Bouquets will bring to us, frame after frame, an exploration of the limits of perception and the possibilities of color in cinema. Read more about this piece in this article (in Spanish) published in Lumière. After that, Nathaniel Dorsky’s Interlude will make us sink into peaceful contemplation with a breathtaking bouquet of collected observations. With Jayne Parker’s Amaryllis we’ll be taken on a journey inside a flower –a whole world of color and texture–, while Transcript by Erica Sheu will immerse us in a delicate atmosphere created with dried flowers, shadows, and cyanotypes: flowers of light translated to paper meet the intimate impressions of handwritten letters at the end of the piece. In Milena Gierke’s Baumschatten the sun creates shapes with shadows cast by trees in a peaceful garden that connects with the one portrayed in Garden Pieces by Margaret Tait, a piece in three acts about a garden, in which we find an animated scene made by painting on the film strip. Then, you’ll be invited to enter a different kind of gardens, those that bloom in the realm of imagination. Our itinerary of metaphoric gardens includes several stops. The first one is Jodie Mack’s time-lapse garden, where frozen plants and flowers die and come back to life in a never-ending cycle. Then, two found footage films will guide us into a disturbing greenhouse (I Began to Wish… by Julie Murray) and a hidden garden where pain and trauma are exorcised (The Secret Garden by Phil Solomon). Jeannette Muñoz and her Puchuncaví lead us to a place by a lake –a garden of intimacy and creativity. Last but not least, the garden that Bruce Baillie cultivates in All My Life brings to us a simple yet transcendental gaze upon the world.
We close this year’s dual edition with a performance that comes to us from Los Angeles –Miwa Matreyek’s Infinitely Yours will be streamed online, but also projected on-site at the Fundación Luis Seoane and on the walls of several locations in A Coruña. Miwa Matreyek, who participated in the festival back in 2012, combines proto-cinema devices (such as Chinese shadow puppetry) with the most advanced audiovisual technologies. The protagonist of her performances is her own shadow, which Matreyek makes interact live with animations, mappings, projections, and other elements, creating a meticulous choreography that is accompanied by a soundtrack composed ad hoc for the event. With Infinitely Yours, Matreyek invites us into a sort of miniature opera on the current global environmental crisis that ends on a hopeful note to help us face our uncertain future.
