The screening of the official section’s sixteen short films begins. Divided into three showings, the first one will be screened on Tuesday, April 4, at 8 p.m., at the Monopol’s screen 4: Abigail (Isabel Penoni, Valentina Homem, Brazil, 2016, 17 min.), Slapper (Luci Schroder, Australia, 2016, 15 min.), No’i (Aline Magrez, Belgium, Vietnam, 2016, 21 min.), Call of Cuteness (Brenda Lien, Germany, 2017, 4 min.), Duel (Alejandro Alonso, Cuba, 2017, 12 min.) y The Painted Calf (David Pantaleón, España, 2017, 10 min.).
Premiered at Cannes’ Filmmakers Fortnight, Abigail is a work of great importance in Latin America that has barely seen in Europe. Memory, traditions and Afro-Amazonian rites are the essence of directors Isabel Peroni and Valentina Homem’s film; the Australian Slapper is released in Europe at this festival after its run at Sundance. In it, Schroder creates the fiction of a universe worthy of Minervini where she shifts the Trump voter for the Aussie suburban; the Belgian-Vietnamese No’i is a pleasant surprise of the Belgian school, awarded at Winterthur, a film of observation with huge discoveries; the German Call of Cuteness gathers funny online videos sifted through with its young director’s animation, recently arrived from the Berlinale. A sinister look to the cat world and its online legions of fans; The Cuban Duel is a disturbing piece about dreams and the monsters that haunt a young boy; the clash in Sierra Maestra between the material and immaterial, reality and fantasy in the life of a boy and his mother; and, finally, The Painted Calf, by David Pantaleón, a Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Film Festival’s veteran who gives us a new biblical image with echoes from the Canarian society and folklore.
The screenings 2 and 3 of this selection of films coordinated for a second year in a row by José Cabrera will be on Wednesday and Thursday, April 5 and 6, respectively. They are titles produced in twenty countries from five continents that, as the official feature film section shows, reflect the thorough global search carried out by the festival. Among them, there are two Spanish works, a coproduction with Holland, The I Mine (Emilio Moreno, Spain, Holland, 2017, 27’) and a Canarian one -included in the first screening, The Painted Calf.
This edition’s short film programming keeps on betting on a cinema that entails a formal stylistic risk and on an unusual introduction to contents already varied. Each screening is proof of the current short films’ diverse reality, with essential elements to reinterpret our own reality. It is the filmmakers’ intuition, who deconstruct the film language discourse to reformulate narratives from a unique point of view. We shall find, among the selected works, tributes to outlawed genres, complex political discourses, returns to a lost spirituality, otherness’ beautiful depictions, panegyrics to memory, binary migrations or philosophical lessons.
More information about the selected short films in:
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