Mostra Competitiva

BUROCRATAS E

HOMENS DE NEGÓCIO

(Apparatchiks & Businnessmen)

Romênia, 2000, cor, vídeo, 59`

Direcao : Stan Neumann

Producao: Les Films d`ici

Immense foggy plains from which decaying factory buildings rise, a factory worker seem through a plastic veil that confuses the outline and the activity, workers silhouettes that at sunset wander around their working spaces. From al this dullness merges a social-economic view of eastern Europe that comes out from the ruins of socialism towards reconstruction and progress. An obscure course , that plays with the same pawns that used to rule the country during the Ceaucescus period: ex-socialists transformed in capitalists of the milenium, ex-doctors that have become manufacturers, ex rocket-plants that have become tin opener plants.

VIZINHAS

(Closer)

Inglaterra/ Franca, 2000

Cor, 35mm, 24’

Direção: Tina Gharavi

Produção: Northern Arts/ Bridge + Tunnel Productions/ Le Fresnoy/ Studio National des Arts Contemporains

Annalise Rodger is a gracious easy mannered 17 year-old that lives in Newcastle. One day, while dancing in a club , she is suddenly approached by an aspirant director that invites her to participate to a film all centerd on her. This is the origin of Closer, an experimental documentary realized without a script and through the active colaboration of the protagonist in all its productive phase. In the principal scene of the film, in which the documentary is mixed in with fiction, mother and daugther in front of the camera live again the moment in which the thirteen year –old Annalise, confessed her homosexuality to her mother ? the fiction tranforms itself in an occasion of real contact and mutual comprehension.

(De grotte vakantie)

Holanda, 1999, cor, 35mm, 131`

Direcao : Johan van der Keuken

Producao : Pieter Van Huyskee Film & TV, Sylvia Baan

Smiling or intimidated faces of african children alternate whit curious objects that belong to the director, who has cancer , and has decided to spend the time he has leftto live in a long trip, a paean to life and to movement : a contradiction to anything inactive. For the deep needs to imortalize the vivid image on a film and to hear the deep sound of breath  inside the microphone, Johan van der Keuken, and his wife fly from Katmandou to Bhutan, from Burkina Faso to Rio de Janeiro, in a journey where earth under all its forms is the real protagonist. After each medical examination, which prognosticates the evolution of the illness, the director documents extreme human life forms, in a continuos fight against adversity.

distribution@ideale-audience.fr

ESPÍRITO DA CERVEJA

(Esprit de bière)

Belgica\Franca, 2000, 35mm, 52’
Direção: Claudio Pazienza
Produção: Komplot Film etc\ Claudio Pazienza

When a material meets another, something new always turn out, and the two materials that have contacted each other are reciprocally transformed. This is what happens, for example, when we drink a tankard of beer : the ingested substance, passing through our body undergoes a series of processes that alterate its chemical structure, up to the that it is expelled as urine. Our body, undergoes a few changes ? some of our cells receive nurishment from the beer, while the regular function of the nervous system is alterated by alcohol. But its also happens when a director (that is realising a documentary on beer) points the camera on his father and asks himself "Who is this man?" What will come out from this new meeting?

komplot@compuserve.com

INVENTÁRIO BALCÂNICO

(Inventario Balcanico)

Italia, 2000, p&b/ cor, 35mm, 63’

Direcao : Yervant Gianikian e Angela Ricci Lucchi

Producao : Y. Gianikian e A. Ricci Lucchi

 “The accumulation of images of human and enviromental catastrophe coming out of ex-Yugoslavia moved us to look for materials and images, testimonies that could recuperate pre-existing life “as it used to be”. Materials for a film that celebrates life as it was lived before the conflicts and divisions. History seen in private life, the intimate life of individuals, starting from the bottom, the small details. The twenties, thirties and forties. A task of analysis, using obsolete formats that can no longer be projected, so that the memory closed inside these rediscoverd images, taken by amateurs, travelers, nazi soldiers in the Balkans, will be indestructible” ( Yervant Gianikian e Angela Ricci Lucchi)

pressoffice@labiennale.com

O ADVOGADO DO BRONX  

(L’affranchi du Bronx)

França/Alemanha,1999,cor,vídeo, 58’

Direção: Felix Olivier

Produção: ZDF/ ARTE

 The secret of the charismatic Ralph Nieves, private investigator, lies in the bewildring manner he treats clients, all residents of the poor districts of New York and who have the right to a defendant (free of charge) that will exculpate them from the heavy charges, most of the times wrong, the State accuses them. When Ralph worked ‘under cover’ as a policemen for the narcotic section, has passed a night in jail ? he had been accused of drug trafic, thanks to his lively mother he has freed at that time and now she works with him as his secretary. Today Ralph is a man that knows the sistem from both sides: he enters as a friend the houses of his puetoricans compatriots, speaks their language, understands their distress and reassures them, because that is what everybody needs.

A TERRA DAS ALMAS ERRANTES

(La terre des amês errantes)

França, 1999, cor, vídeo, 98’

Direção: Rithy Panh

Produção: INA/ La Sept-Arte

The land of Cambodja, a territory yhat separates Thailand from Vietnan, had submerged the sorrows and atrocities of those who died in war. But now the new era of a global village demands informatics highways. The diggings necessary to the cabling bring back to light, togheter with war ordeals and corpses, the emotive and spiritual tragedy of a desperate people, suffering hunger, digging and destroiyng its own history and traditions between a new world and ancestral beliefs. Through portraits of strong emotive impact, La Terre de Ames Errantes show the paradoxes of a land that covers with tragedy its technological progress, while providing optical fibres to houses lit by pedal-lamps.

NALAN TÜKELI, UMA MULHER DA FAVELA

(Nalan Türkeli, une femme des bidonvilles)

Turquia/França, 1999,cor, 35mm, 62’

Direção: Évelyne Ragot

Produção: Turquie/ Pop Production/ Dominant 7/ Senso Films/ Neyrac Films/ La Sept-Arte 

Istambul. A woman wakes up at dawn to sell fish at the market. At Mevlana, a neighbourhood under construction, there are no roads, nor water, nor schools, nor telephones. The voices through a megaphone and the flags of an hypocrit electoral campaign promising the best obstruct the streets. The woman looks at all this with indiferent cynicism and she transcripts this reality in a diary tha she intends to publicate. She will succeed, even if the emotional and the pity for the life condition in the bidonvilles, will soon leave place to indiference. Nalan continuesto move between gecekondu, the houses constructed over night by the homeless, that the next morning risk to be destructed. Her oldest son continues to steal birds that he will sell at the market, and is so also willing to kill if the local mob will pay him well enough. And the street boys that sniff glue and beg will continue not to have dreams for the future.

SAUDADE DO FUTURO 

França/ Bélgica/ Brasil, 2000, cor, 35mm, 94’

Direção: César Paes

Produção: Laterit Productions, Cobra Films, Mezzo/ Voyage/ LX Filmes

São Paulo is one of the five biggest cities in the world. Situated at the south of Brasil, it is the destination of the poor immigrants from the north-east part of the country. Looked at with suspicion and prejudice, these men survive as they can, cultivate the dream of returning to their native town, once they have made fortune. Most of them are “cantadores”, repositories of a rich oral tradition, made of improvised rhymes and insult challenges accompanied by the quick and overwhelming rythm of guitars and drums. These modern street singers and their “repentes” have the task of narrating the big metropolis and the “saudade” that strikes those that have to live therein.

laterit@magic.fr

SOZINHA COM A GUERRA

(Seule avec la guerre) 

  França/ Bélgica, 2000,cor,vídeo, 58’

Direção: Danielle Arbid

Produção: Movimento Production, Christian Baute

15 years of civil war, and everyone acts as though nothing has happened. After a war caused for reasons that are not yet clear and which from 1975 to 1990 saw everyone against everyone else, there is something unsettlingabout the past, now that there is a common enemy (Israel). The young director of this film, however, refuses to give into the general indiference : she wants to know where all that violence has gone, where it is chaneneled, and where it might explode again the next time.

A VIDA E OS TEMPOS DE HANK

(The life and the times of

Hank Greenberg)

USA, 1998, cor, 16mm, 90’

Direção: Aviva Kempner

Produção:  The Ciesla Fondation

America that at the end of the 30’s was getting ready to fight against Hitler, was a land with strong social tensions, such as racial discrimination and anti-semitic, In the same period a young jew succeded in breaking the prejudice barrier and to become a champion in the sport which simbolizes the United States : baseball. The life and the times of Hank Greenberg reconstructs with extreme accuracy (through rare films of that period, and the passionate testimonies of friends, relatives, team companions and famous supporters, a research worked lasted thirteen years) the extraordinary career of this amrican hero, that refuses to go on the playground during the religious festivities and made milion coreligionist dream.

A PUNIÇÃO

(The punishment)

Áustria, 2000, cor, 35mm, 100'

  Direçao: Goran Rebic

Produção: Novotny & Novotny Filmproduktion

How does life continue in a city that has undergone the ‘punnishment’ of bonbardment ? What do their inhabitants think and what are their feelings for those that have punnished, or that have ruled them ? And which ‘fault’ are they willing to burden ? The city of Belgrad, and the people that try to give ask to these questions in front of the camera are, students, soldiers, children, writers, actors, pysichologists, political activists, and common people ; Behind them we can see the wounds left by teh bombardments, and we aassist at the great manifestations against Milosevic, up to the celebrations for the new millenium, welcomed (it seems incredible) by firecrackers and explosives.

UM DIA NA VIDA DE ANDREJ ARSENEVITCH

(Jounée d'Andrej Arsenevitch)

França, 2000, cor, vídeo/16mm, 55’

Direção: Chris Marker

Produçao: Amip/ La Sept-Art/ INA/ Arkeion Films

fter five years, the soviet authorities grant Tarkovskij the visa to go aboard and reunite with his father in Paris, who is dying and is in the process of ending the editing of Offret. The touching images of this reunion mix-up and confused with the extraordinary reminds of  Tarkovskij’s cinematography work. The poetics and the favorite themes of the artistis (faith, raport between cinema and painting, crossing the borders, the time-frame, the liquid surfaces) are analised approching sequences from his famous films and confronting them with the real experiences of life. An important document are the shootings on the set of the last film directed by Tarkovskij: an unforgetable portrait of a genius at work.

NO VENTO QUE SOPRA

(Zanesjennye vetrom)

Russia, 2000, cor, 35mm, 52’

Direção: Andrei Osipov

Produção: G. Gorodny  

Shoyna was once a florid fishing colony 600km far from Archangel (Rússia), in front of the White Sea. Its actual inhabitants are 400, a third of which are retired. Life in this almost completely isolated place from the rest of the world (only two planes a year land) is very particular. The sea-sand risks to bury the entire village, so that the houses have to be excavated continuously. Poverty is great and the climate is polar, through no one wants to leave, and the people show a remarkable attachment to this country: perhaps because of this privilege of liberty they have always had (even when in other places there used to be the Soviet dictartorship) and that only such extreeme life conditions can allow.