Explore by #Jorge Yglesias
Anhell69
Screenings in Swiss cinema theatres
A hearse carrying a coffin with the “corpse” of Colombian director Theo Montoya travels through highways and streets of Medellin in a ghostly journey of remembrances of his childhood, the birth of his love for auteur cinema, his sexuality and those members of the queer community he befriended during the casting sessions of a B-movie he never made: a metaphor for a ferocious city whose spectral inhabitants constitute an army of living dead.
All along the itinerary Theo Montoya's voice-over reanimates these snippets of memories and builds a series of notes that end up creating a sort of requiem for truncated lives and desires. While watching Anhell69 one has the impression that the would-to-be movie has won a quality hard to attain as only pure “fiction”, now transformed into the anguished depiction of an uncertain future.
What Montoya puts before our eyes is the portrait of a fatherless generation, a threnody for a submerged world populated by - to use a Canettian term - packs of temporary survivors of a dystopic city where every corner seems to be under the spell of the phantom of Pablo Escobar. To add more meaning to his voyage, Montoya entrusted the steering of the car to Victor Gaviria, one of the more influential directors on young Colombian filmmakers.
Anhell69, a title derived of the blend of “angel” and “hell”, is the name of an Instagram profile of Camilo Najar, one of the film’s protagonists, a 21-year-old graphic design student who died some days after the interview. The film is always confronted with different faces of death: of Theo Montoya´s fictitious one; of people who ceased to be; of zombies wandering around. When interviewed the members of the queer community reveal a fragility that seems to attenuate and even disappear when they indulge in wild parties, but which is expressed with painful beauty in those moments when they seek protection and try to conjure their fate by embracing one another, until their “no future” destiny comes to them implacably, and then a few weeks, months or years later they will die, victims of drug abuse and violence.
This gloomy and unsettling essay on a kidnapped country where its young protagonists are potential prey for all kind of haters (narcos, guerrilla, military) is, according to Montoya, a “trans film”, not only in terms of sexual identity but also its transgression of narrative standards. Punctuated by shots of the travelling corpse, its opaque narration, fragments of interviews, images of the vampire picture he tried to make, and views of Medellin (produced thanks to its dependence on a recurring dronephilia), this fictional story inside a documentary film creates a dark canvas of uneasiness that is hard to forget.
Confronting archival footage of the signing of the peace agreement between the guerrillas and the government, terrorism and civil protests with the confessions of the young people during the casting, Montoya talks about a tragic personal experience and its imprint on the film that never was and the one he is building as a B movie of ghosts in honor of the quick and the dead.
Anhell69 | Film | Theo Montoya | COL-ROM-FR-DE 2022 | 75’ | Black Movie Festival Genève 2023
Noche de fuego
Screeners in January 2023 at Cinéma CityClub Pully and Les cinémas du Grütli Genève
An insect climbing a branch, a platoon of ants carrying a flower, a multicolored poisonous serpent: these are the humble wonders of creation that Ana – the main character of the tenderhearted Noche de fuego – watches attentively at the beginning of Tatiana Huezo´s first fiction picture after two remarkable documentaries. The quietness and transparency of such illuminations contrast with the violence beating a path through a village seized by fear of the military and drug dealers. A gorgeous nature underlies the loneliness and vulnerability of a threatened childhood in a community who earns its daily bread in a field of poppies, extracting opium gum from the beautiful flowers, one of the many paradoxes used brilliantly by a mise en scène that privileges insinuation instead of melodramatic logorrhea.
A boyfriend at the service of a cartel, an absent father, an unwanted haircut, a best friend kidnapped, a home always on the verge of being abandoned, an abrupt coming of age: these are the gifts the precarious stability of her country imposes on Ana. The most important lesson she has to learn is how to conceal her femininity in order to preserve it. In this story of transition from childhood to adolescence in difficult circumstances, terror is under the skin and the “enemy” is seen from a distance, as if the observer were hidden.
Noche de fuego is prodigal in striking images: villagers upon a hill at sunset, their phones lit up trying to connect with relatives and friends; Ana under a sheet playing hide-and-seek with her friends in a scene totally dominated by a red tonality; a convoy of narco-trucks, firing into the air as they pass in front of soldiers positioned on a street, as if they were their subordinates; a running girl doused by a toxic substance sprinkled by a plane…
Noche de fuego is at its best when documentary rules fiction, such as when the hand-held camera of DP Dariela Ludlow emphasizes how insecurity forces urgency and stress on the characters. The first part of the film is sculpted with extreme delicacy, punctuated by restrained music and sounds of nature and humans. When the elliptical give way to the literal, the depth of this chronicle of sorrow weakens and experience bows to predictable narrative (shot/reverse shot, a bit of formal redundancy). The difference between the sometimes mesmerizing intensity of the first half of the movie, where the real predominates, and the looseness of the more fictionalized second half, could be interpreted as a strategy to represent the ending of a fairytale and the tyranny of panic.
Nevertheless, this feature about helpless people, especially women, centered on avoiding violence, is not a piece of fatalism. Though sadness permeates everything and to survive seems to be the only reason to exist, the protagonists are what Tatiana Huezo calls “seed-girls”, sustaining each other with strength, fidelity and virtue. More than a journey into quotidian uneasiness, Noche de fuego is a silence within a silence, a cry, a prayer, a whisper.
Noche de fuego | Film | Tatiana Huezo | MEX-ARG-BRA-DE-USA-CH 2022 | 110’ | Zurich Film Festival 2022, Filmar en América Latina Genève 2022
Abyssal
In the beginning of Abyssal, a camera follows a man ascending through an iron spiral staircase to the top of a lighthouse in a silent bay of West Cuba. In the highest part, while the source of brightness gyres and gyres, the anamorphic face of the man sets the tone of this trancelike portrayal of a community of scrap merchants working in a landscape where time seems to come to a stop.
Gloriously far from the socialist realism commandment of “typical people in typical situations”, the workers of Abyssal wander around abandoned places as phantoms trying to make gold out of the waste. The hypnotic quality of the film, its whisper-more-than-a-cry substance, weave an unusual science fiction story where Andrei Tarkovski and Werner Herzog shake hands, and human beings are treated as “beautiful forms” exposing illusions (to be Superman) or wondering about other worlds. In one of the most suggestive shots of the film a man is peeping at life through a hole in a shipwreck, as if this metaphysical abyss upon earth were a vast dungeon. No doubt the scene of an indoor pursuit through narrows corridors of what, at the end, turns out to be a carrier pigeon shows Alonso´s incredible gift for poetry.
Surrounded by a motionless sea, these men, who believe that ships have a soul, compare their visions and thoughts as if they were dead people lost in a reverie. Absorbed by their task of recycling wrecks, these dialectical Sisyphus soften the sense of confinement that permeates the picture with their childish innocence when discussing reality. Though practically every area seems to be part of a prison (in fact, some of the workers are ex-convicts), sometimes closed, sometimes open to the air, their dreams are the windows they need to breathe.
Avoiding the pornographic exploitation of misery or blind engagement style, Alejandro Alonso has given sense to a reality he knows well, translating it into a “nowhereness” made of garbage and fragments, rags of memories and fantasies. Every image, every sound, is conquered with wisdom and respect towards this group of dreamed dreamers living in the waste. He is probably the Cuban filmmaker that has found the most original metaphors to reveal aspects of daily life in his country. In his films there exists a dignified home for cinema, between a culture cheapened by the rise of tourism and the excess of political propaganda of both sides. The eroded territory populated by suffocating cabins, mute nature, tales of apparitions and disappearances depicted by Alejandro Alonso with restrained piety in Abyssal is the nightmare naïve travellers fears the most: no old cars, no sensuous pieces of flesh dancing, no happy poor.
Abyssal | Film | Alejandro Alonso | CUB-FR 2021 | 30’ | Visions du Réel Nyon 2021
The Green Fog
Capriciously related to the plot of Alfred Hitchcock´s Vertigo, Guy Maddin and brothers Evan & Galen Johnson´s The Green Fog is a parodical Frankenstein assembled from pieces from movies and television shows set in San Francisco. As it was commissioned by the San Francisco Film Society to be premiered at the close of the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival on April 16, 2017, the film has been easily classified as a tribute or homage, even a remake. Maddin himself has employed terms such as «emotional geography» and «rhapsody on Vertigo» when asked about this lecture on creative stealing and film scholarship with plenty of funny (sometimes sombre) echoes of a romantic thriller.
In some way The Green Fog invite us to forget Hitchcock and play with the idea of how ridiculous can be a film and/or some ways to watch it. Radical subtractions and humorous additions become tools to construct a weird artefact to prove that authorship survives any attempt to supplant its genuineness; it doesn´t matter who is implied, if Mr. Ed Wood or Sir Orson Welles. At the same time, Maddin and his witty henchmen emerge clear winners from this unsafe zone where Vertigo is a stimulating absence. Its exercise of style consists of unpicking the seam of this classic of suspense and replacing it with an anthology of homeless shots and guillotined conversations.
In this deliciously campy Atlas Mnemosyne of Frisco portrayed by cinema and TV, Maddin & the Johnson Brothers tie the tongues of some characters, launch a Hamletian, contemplative Chuck Norris, and reduce its main referent to a fragment of the stairs seen in the rooftop chase. Throughout this process what was a detective movie turns into a comedy, seriousness gives way to cunning frivolity. If it’s true that there’s always something of burlesque in films that supplant the mood of an original story by strained gravity sthen in The Green Fog any operation is permeated by a disquieting and typically maddinesque malice. The awareness of dealing with shots that have lost their natural hors-champs increases the strangeness of this creature begotten by cinephilia and an acute sense of the uncanny. Ceci n'est pas Hitchcock.
The Green Fog | Film | Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson | USA 2017 | 63’
Screenings in Swiss cinema theatres
