Zonazine. Festival de Málaga, Cine en español
in collaborazione con / in cooperation with Instituto Cervantes Palermo
This out-of-competition showcase was born thanks to a collaboration between the Sole Luna Doc Film Festival and the Festival de Málaga – Cine en español and to the relationship that our festival has established over the years with the Instituto Cervantes of Palermo. The Màlaga Festival was born in 1998 and represents a privileged point of reference for the national and international cinematography, with a particular focus on documentary cinema, one of the most interesting creative aspects of cinema in Spanish.
The showcase presents a selection of films of the 2018 edition of the Festival, with a focus on the important subjects of four female directors. The condition of refugees from the Middle East wars finds expression in Hayati by the Catalan directors Liliana Torres and Sofía Escuder. Here we meet the Syrian Osama Abdul Mohsen, who sadly hit the headlines for being pushed by a Hungarian journalist in 2015 while crossing the border. An emblematic episode of an inhuman Europe, the affair of this refugee reminds us of a story of other people who have experienced the horror of war: the break-up of families, the obstinate search for reunion with the loved ones, the hope of starting over.
Claudia Abend and Adriana Loeff from Uruguay face the question of love, of the end of the solidarity among the loved ones, of the disagreement that can occur at the end of a shared life journey. La flor de la vida is the story of two eighty-year-olds who decide to put an end to decades of life together. The film Ata tu arado a una estrella by the Argentinian documentary filmmaker Carmen Guarini, is dedicated to Fernando Birri. Birri, recently deceased in Rome, in 2017, starting in the 1960s, revolutionised the documentary cinema of Latin American with Tire dié and successively directed the famous film school of San Antonio de los Baños, in Cuba. Carmen Guarini retraces the highlights of Berri’s life offering us a respectful and warm portrait. In the end, the Chilean director (with Spanish citizenship) Carolina Astudillo, that our audience has already known in 2015 with El gran vuelo. Astudillo realises with Ainhoa. Yo no soy esa one of the most interesting works of documentary cinema in Spanish, with a clever editing of found footage and archive materials. Starting from the biography of an unknown woman, Ainhoa, documented through amateur videos, letters, diaries, telephone recordings, the director, calling her personal ghosts, show some female artists on stage (Sylvia Plath, Alejandra Pizarnik, Frida Kahlo), complex characters whose life is divided between transgressions and painful wounds.
Ainhoa, yo no soy esa
regia / director Carolina Astudillo
fotografia / photography Carolina Astudillo
montaggio / editing Ana Pfaff, Elena Imaz y José Nicolás
produzione / production Carolina Astudillo, Belén Sánchez
Spagna 2018, 98′
v.o. con sottotitoli in italiano e inglese / o.v. with Italian and English subtitles
Ainhoa Mata Juanicotena was born into a family that filmed, recorded and photographed her life for many years. In her adolescence, at the end of the eighties, Ainhoa began to write what she did not want to tell anyone. The diaries of life that she kept until his death describe a woman different from the one that her relatives and friends knew. Intimate diaries that reveal an infinity of themes related to the feminine experience and about those that other women have written throughout history. No matter the geographical or temporal distance, issues, sensations and moods come together. Ahinoa yo no soy esa is also an alternative chronicle to the official history of the Spain of the nineties, told through the diaries of life of a woman.
Ata tu arado a una estrella
regia / director Carmen Guarini
fotografia / photography Martín Gamaler
montaggio / editing Carmen Guarini
musica / music Gustavo Pomeranec
produzione / production El Desentanto Films, srl. Marcelo Céspedes
Argentina 2018, 82′
v.o. con sottotitoli in italiano e inglese / o.v. with Italian and English subtitles
In 1997 Fernando Birri returns to film in his country to speak about the validity of the utopias and the director decides to register these moments. A first montage of this documentary was hidden for 18 years in a fragile VHS. Today it comes back to light, to become a new film that updates the validity of the voice of this poet, teacher of numerous generations of Latin American cinema, who, at 92, continues to try to catch their own utopias.
Hayati
regia / direction Liliana Torres, Sofi Escudé
fotografia / photography Alberto Borque
montaggio / editing Liliana Torres, Sofi Escudé
produzione / production Boogaloo Films, Les Films d’Ici, Escandalo Films, Les Films d’Ici Méditéranée
Spagna-Francia 2018, 85′
inglese / Spanish with Italian and English subtitles
In 2015, Ossamah Al Mohsen and his 8-year-old son were tripped up by a TV reporter on the Hungarian border. The moment was captured on film and it soon became one of the most iconic images of the Syrian conflict. This incident helped Ossamah to get a job as a football coach when he reached Madrid. But the rest of his family is still stuck in Turkey. Ossamah lives far away from his wife and other three children, and the chances of them obtaining a visa are fading away. What of their dreams and life ambitions? Hayati (“My life”) is the story of Ossamah and his son Zeid. It is also the story of Moatassam, Youssef and Muhannad: three promising Syrian football players whose best years have been darkened by the shadow of war.
La flor de la vida
regia / direction Claudia Abend, Adriana Loeff
fotografia / photography Jackie Bourdette, Fabio Berrutti
produzione / procuction Mms Films, The Filmmaker Fund
Uruguay 2018, 86′
spagnolo con sottotitoli in italiano e inglese / Spanish with Italian and English subtitles
ldo and Gabriella have been married for almost fifty years, have three children and several grandchildren, and prepare to live their old age in tranquility. But something is not right. Those young people who were passionate about each other in the 50s, who swore to love and accompany each other until the last day, are estranged. Their personalities, their interests and their ways of seeing the world are no longer the same. And when they turn eighty they begin to wonder: Why are we together? The flower of life is a fairy tale facing reality, a universal story about love and lack of love, relationships, and the challenges of aging.