Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Al borde del universo/ At the edge of the universe(EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Argentine
  • France

Director: 

Rubén H. Guzmán

Production company: 

Synopsis: 

Structured as a triptych, At the edge of the universe describes the lives of three people living in Patagonia. Each one of them has opted for a simple life far from the madness of the world. At the edge of the universe is both a creative and observational documentary.

It employs rich aesthetic and experimental treatment in lieu of the usual conventional elements common to industrial documentaries (talking heads, authoritative male voice-over and excesive use of music). The film eventually shifts from its prevailing observational tone into a more experimental and poetic form. Thus, the overall design can be best defined as a hybrid form of documentary. The film is predominantly visual, based on an experience close to real-time perception. Both images and time play a fundamental rôle in portraying the lives of all three characters in their own Patagonian milieu. With regards to light --which is of utmost importance to me-- it ought to be naturalistic at all times. That is, I always favour the use of available light (and beautiful and suggestive darkness!). The viewer will be able to enjoy the plastic, sometimes dream-like and poetic quality of the film trough carefully constructed and composed images.

Contactado (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Pérou
  • Venezuela

Director: 

Marité Ugas

Production company: 

Synopsis: 

Our character, surrounded by his followers, stares at the night sky, which is lit up by a perpetual lightning that is repeated every 45 seconds. Our character smiles for the group, crossing his fingers in a peculiar way. Some of them, excited, bow before the  lightning. Our character is a young man who has been “contacted” (meaning that he has peaceful encounters with aliens), with followers of his own, mostly poor people with their need to believe, in a context devoid of any hope. Our contactee keeps them captivated with millennial speeches and resorting to unique natural phenomena, as evidence of interstellar presence. It is moving and hilarious to see how innocently the followers are captivated by his speeches. This contrasts with dogmatic attitude of our contactee, who we will little by little discover as a cynic and a skeptic, who obviously doesn’t believe in what he preaches. Suddenly, little unexplainable events, similar to those he uses to manipulate his followers, will begin to disturb him. Our contactee will begin to lose his self confidence. He becomes paranoid. The unexplainable events of which “he is the only witness” increase, as apocalyptic nightmares. His imagination begins playing tricks on him. He becomes his own worst enemy.

De brique et de tôle (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Brésil
  • France

Director: 

Elsa Deshors

Production company: 

Synopsis: 

Have you ever seen a favela at nightfall ? What kind of show it is ? Hundreds of disordered structures clustered on the slopes of a hill light up like a galaxy being born. This quiet beauty contrast to the chaotic bustle that dominates the streets during the day. Martin is walking on the gateway. Behind him, in the background Rocinha's Favela, no more sky. He greets an acquaintance and walks down the street to his house. He enters and finds his son. A newspaper article talks about the health at Rocinha, a dialogue ensues. He pulls out old photos that show the works for the installation of pipelines running water. We see the waste littering the floor and dirty water flowing in the streets. Night falls on the favela. The children come home from school, headlights from motorcycles-taxis dazzle. Flavio is ready for his hip-hop workshop. He leaves, through the noisy streets of the favela. On a roof, he finds teenagers and his band. They discuss about the news of the neighborhood. Then, some dance while others rap. Their lyrics speak of the struggle "favelados" for the right to a better life. Through these scenes the film leads us to discover those, from one generation to the other, who fought for the right to housing and a dignified life.

El Aguante (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Documentaire

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Argentine
  • France

Director: 

Nina Dupeux
Emmanuel Briand

Production company: 

Synopsis: 

In 2001, Argentina suffers a catastrophic crisis. Some workers take the initiative to illegally recover their factories and rekindle the production. More than 10 years later, these firms still exist. Some have found back the legal way. Workers can be paid and new recoveries happen. Andres Ruggieri is an Argentinean anthropologist who was early interested in the subject. Today he travels along the world to talk about is experience. In February 2014, he went to the Fralib company in France where workers try to recover their production mode.

El Patio (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Documentaire

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Chili
  • France

Director: 

Elvira Diaz

Synopsis: 

September 11th, 1973. The Chilean army and the CIA bombed the presidential palace of the socialist president Salvador Allende. Then followed 17 years of terror and brutal repression. 3200 people have been reported dead and 1200 are still missing. In Santiago’s General Cemetery, 5 gravediggers who have worked during the dictatorship are still employed at the cemetery. They have never spoken out about what lived. Because, for the last 40 years, they have been trying to forget. To forget that, watched 24 hours a day, they buried clandestinely, hundreds of unidentified victims. To forget they were atrociously mutilated and tortured. They have been trying to forget the morgue. The floor were strewn with rotting corpses and the walls were crawling with maggots. They also tried to forget the deaths of colleagues who had sunken into alcoholism, depression or madness. Resistance and resilience were the only ways to survive during this descent into Hell. The film will be shot exclusively inside the cemetery and will bring to light these previously unspoken words. Words which via these alleys and certain iconic tombs will bring history to the surface and enable us to look beyond the Chilean reality, and see how a totalitarian state puts into practice the mechanisms of dehumanization.

Hablemos del tiempo / Small Talk (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Chili

Director: 

Marcela Said

Production company: 

Synopsis: 

Mariana (40) is married to Pedro (45), a workoholic economist. She lacks selfconfidence, always treated like a child by her father and then by her husband. Mariana belongs to a sexist and violent society where Chilean bourgeois women are reduced to the task of raising children and tolerating their husbands. Mariana stars taking horse riding lessons and develops an awkward connection with Juan (70) a former colonel, who becomes her instructor, mentor and accomplice. He enables her to recover her sensuality and the confidence she lacked. One day a journalist appears, searching for the colonel in order to talk to him about the time he was the head of a torture center where hundreds of people died during the Pinochet dictatorship. Mariana’s husband immediately asks her to stop the lessons but she refuses and decides to stay close to the colonel until he goes to prison for life.  Smalltalk is a film about a woman, a silent victim of violence, who must learn how to assume it in order to overcome it. The film shows us what it means to live in a hostile and oppressive environment usually disguised as acceptance and comfort, not easy to abandon, since the price of emotional freedom can be so high that it might be unattainable.

Huaquero (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Équateur
  • Pérou
  • Bolivie

Director: 

Juan Carlos Donoso Gómez

Synopsis: 

Saywa (25). He is a young indigenous boy from the Ecuadorian mountains. Near to his house, there are a forgotten Inca’s ruin where he finds a small “huaca” with archaeological pieces. He takes them from this sacred site selling them for cheap, making little money. One day he finds a bigger one, but when he takes the piece back home, his family disapproves him. They ruthlessly punish him in front of the entire community in the indigenous justice way. After this event, he decides to leave his town to start a journey towards southern lands, following the Andes in South America. In Trujillo (Peru) he meets a group of men that are professional “Huaqueros” and this gang invites him to make a little robbery in Lima. Later in Lima, they meet with an European illegal dealer of archaeology who offers them a crazy amount of money for a pre-inca mummy, which is buried close to the spectacular “Salar de Uyuni” (Bolivia). During the looting they are discovered, starting a shooting were one of them die. Saywa and the rest of the gang are trying to escape driving along Uyuni, he regrets of what he is doing. In a final fight he kills his last companion with his weapon. Saywa walks alone by the Uyuni salty landscape with the mummy in his arms and with no direction.

J&A (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Argentine

Director: 

Mena Duarte

Production company: 

Synopsis: 

Jazmin and Agustina come back from their holyday in Brazil. They return to the flat where they live together but things are not easy, since something went wrong during the trip. They try to get back to the old life they used to share, the old habits. But it gets clear that whatever happened has changed something. Jazmin seems fragile and vulnerable. Agustina acts rather protective and consoling. Eventually, Jazmin needs more and more from Agustina, who is somehow troubled too because she feels responsable for her best friend but also increasingly reluctant to their shared intimacy. As she finds herself more interested in her life outside the flat (boyfriend, career), Jazmin goes deeper in her instability. She ends up sharing the truth about the episode in Brazil with her mother, an attractive woman with whom she has a conflictive relationship. She relates that they had met two suspicious guys and, after a rather odd sexual experience, she had killed one of them to protect themselves. After that, Jazmin efforts to keep Agustina close to her get more radical; she interferes with all other Agustina’s relationships and interests, as she is in a jealous behavior that gets out of hand. Finally, Agustina accepts to face her friend and tell her she is going away to live alone. They talk sitting on the bed. The cry and embrace each other until they fall asleep. Jazmin gets up and goes to the kitchen and take a knife to murder her friend.

La desconocida (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Argentine

Director: 

Natalia Smirnoff

Synopsis: 

Clara (39) is a well-known illustrator that less than a year ago won a very important prize that changed her economic status and found herself on the public eye, so she moved with her family to a suburb to be more focused on her work. Her husband, Francisco, is her pleader and defender, sometimes over-protective. Also Sammie, her agent. Between both of them, kind of handle Clara´s life. Among this adaptation and discovery, she goes to the town to buy something, and finds Ariel, the butcher, her old boyfriend, with whom 20 years ago, dreamed of living in that place. The impact is mutual. Ariel doesn’t know anything about the public life of Clara and she enjoys this on top of everything. They start a series of random encounters, continued by some programmed ones, doing things that they used to do and are no longer part of her current life. Ariel lives one day at a time, without thinking or expecting too much. Something that contrasts a lot with Clara’s family and working life, full of important and exposed events, as well as tidy up and tight orders. Clara goes into crisis with what she has to draw next, finding herself in an unknown place, where she finds out from Ariel who she was and who is she now. What changed, what is her essence, what she lost? Who she wants to be from now?

La Nueva Medellin (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Colombie
  • France

Director: 

Catalina Villar

Synopsis: 

Invited by adolescents I had filmed in a Medellin slum 16 years ago, I return to the city that was known back then as "the most dangerous city in the world"; I discover that it has become the "most innovative city on the planet". An emblem of this change lies in this very neighbourhood: the Biblioteca España, a symbol of the state of things in this microcosm of Colombia. In 1997 I filmed three young people who are today fully involved in their neighbourhood’s life. As the owner of a photography business specialising in weddings and communions, Wilmar is in charge of the residents’ image. Manual is President of the "Community Action Committee", in charge of finding solutions to the neighbourhood’s problems. Maria Eugenia, who was teaching her mother to read in my film, is now a Spanish teacher at the school. The documentary will be haunted by the presence of a phantom poet, killed two years after my first film. A person forgotten by no one but whose ashes are best left untouched. A metaphor for horror, amnesia and impurity. We are going to evaluate what is at stake for a neighbourhood that the city decided to incorporate. In 1997, I asked them: How do you see yourself in 10 years? School did not change the world, but it changed those who could change the world.

Las herederas / The Heiresses (en)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Paraguay

Director: 

Marcelo Martinessi

Production company: 

Synopsis: 

Asunción, Paraguay, 2013. Chela (60), has been living with Martina (61) for more than 30 years. As heiresses from prosperous families, they have received enough money to live comfortably without the need to work. But as they both turn 60, the inheritance starts to run out. With the passage of time and the difficult economic situation, the relationship between them has worn out and become a succession of long silences. It all gets more complicated as Martina faces prosecution for unpaid debts and has to go to jail. Chela visits Martina whenever she is allowed. They meet in a communal area where they talk and observe the lives of the other inmates. Chela feels desperate to help secure Martina's release and is obsessed with the bars surrounding her, as if she were also a criminal. In order to make money to pay for lawyers and her expenses, Chela organises garage sales and provides a sort of taxi service, for older women. This is how she meets Mara, a 50 year old, daughter of one of her clients, to whom Chela connects with instantly. The new experiences affecting Chela’s life will change her perspective of a world that she has never before allowed herself to discover.

 

Las Tinieblas / The Darkness (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Mexique

Director: 

Daniel Castro Zimbron

Production company: 

Synopsis: 

In a forest always covered by a dense fog, Gustavo has maintained his three children locked in the basement of an old cabin making them to believe that a wild beast roams the depths of the forest. Marcos, the eldest son, has not been back since the last time he went hunting with his father. In an effort to find his brother, Argel will discover the mysteries and secrets that both Gustavo and the forest hide and will have to decide how far he can go to confront what is hidden in darkness.

Los muertos no quieren nadar (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • France

Director: 

Brigitte Bousquet
Marco Bentz

Production company: 

Synopsis: 

In the Peruvian Amazon, while small groups are formed to deal with abuse by the state and the introduction of money in their lives, others do nothing and others know nothing. Through the portrayal of several characters and a poetic fiction which suggests both the history and myths of the region, the documentary questions the Amazonian reality, exposes the day to day consequences of the global economy and wonders about the place of humanity in a world without God. At the mercy of the slow journey up the river, the characters and facts we encounter illustrate the reality of this complex web, where we confront boundaries of culture, environment and spirituality. The film develops on a human scale, with "Indians" without feathers or make-up, westerners more or less lost and ordinary poverty. The narrative weaves through interviews and observation that mix staging and contemplative digressions, but also by the tenuous presence of a witness to the journey. A short fiction, inspired by the form of Noh theater, shows both mythologies, history and dreams. Through its poetry, it proposes other perspectives, other possibilities. Roles, randomly distributed through the encounters, are an excuse to play around with reality and illusion, a limit that does not exist in this shamanic culture.

Pachawawa! (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Argentine
  • Pérou
  • Paraguay

Director: 

Ezequiel Suarez Greck

Synopsis: 

From the southern south, this is their story: Aoni, the Tehuelche hunter; Riu, the Rapanui builder; Ñande Sy, the Guarani shaman; Chaski, the Inca traveller; and Ze, the young z’oé; all of them are "PachaWawa" (Children of Earth), representatives of five Latin American native cultures. They are the advocates of the Earth and its resources, and become unintentional defenders after the arrival of a new and ravenous force known as “Likingos”. Aoni won’t be “a Tehuelche” but somehow “all” the Tehuelches. An idealization, like a sum of their traits and cosmology. They will inhabit in a timeless and pseudo-fantasy era, with an aesthetic and narrative style prior to the European conquest. On the other hand, the Likingos embody a representation of the consumerism and the economic anxiety of the  “Like” era. It works as a metaphor of a disproportionate desire for material possessions and the unbridled exploitation of natural resources. They advance and consume, wrecking everything in their path, without any destination or cause. Throughout the 26 short films that make up this saga, the diverse and continuos situations that unfold in each episode will shape the story of an epic and fantastic feat about the defense of this land against such strange enemy.

Paterno / Paternal (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Brésil

Director: 

Marcelo Lordello

Production company: 

Synopsis: 

Sergio is an 53 year-old architect who works for his father, Hector, in the family construction company for 30 years. Year after year Sergio was giving up his professional dreams in favor of commitment to the familial business’s growth and Hector’s vision of success, in parallel with the progress of the city. Recife, the 5th largest city in Brazil, is undergoing an urban transformation, as strategic economic development plan for the northeast of Brazil. The city is receiving massive investment, guided by an ambitious elite. Here, the same mistakes made in other major cities in the world are being repeated in the name of blind progress. Today, Recife is the perfect place to profit.The current Brazilian economic boom and the discovery of Hector’s new cancer metastasis gives a unique opportunity to Sérgio take control over his own life. "Paterno" follows the strategies of Sergio to become the majority shareholder of the family business, enriching with a illegal mega-venture beachfront, where he’ll build his most ambitious architectural project. While waiting for his father death, Sergio discovers that Hector had another family with legal and equal rights to his assets. Something that could destroy Sergio’s plans of power, wealth and glory. But he’ll not let it happen.

Submersible (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Équateur
  • Mexique

Director: 

Alfredo León León

Synopsis: 

Four strangers locked in one submersible capsule trapped under the sea, on a seven- day trip from the coast of Ecuador towards North America. Reunited by different circumstances in an extreme situation. Nobody knows who the other one is or why they decided to be there. They fear each other. Sharing a claustrophobic and dangerous mission, carrying 10 tons of cocaine and a very special gift. A contained story exploring a human drama, specifically the relationship between Kleber, the mechanic who wants to find her daughter in the United States; Aquiles, a driver looking for recognition from a powerful cartel; Felix, an undercover DEA agent who wants to catch them, and La Reina, a young and innocent woman who is taken against her will as a "gift" to the cartel leaders. The goal of delivering the "goods" will be postponed by another one more immediate... survive and prevail.

The employer and the employee (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Uruguay

Director: 

Manuel Nieto

Synopsis: 

The film is about the relationship between an employee and his employer. How it thrives and after breaks. On the  tortuous relationship of both with happiness, freedom and work. The employer is a young owner of several rural businesses. He belongs to a new generation of agricultural operators who do not fit with the traditional stereotype of rural producer. He comes from a bourgeois family and he practices a modern life. But he has a great concern: the employer and his wife awaiting the result of a study about the health of their baby. They fear the worst. He has everything, except the health of their child. The employee is even younger than his employer. He is the eldest son of a local hunting guide and for the first time takes a job on the tractor. He lives in countryside amid a wild humility, even with their parents and the mother of his child. He has an urgent need for a proper job. He dreams to run a “raid” for which trains a horse. Tragedy ensues. The employee’s baby dies in a tractor accident drive by him. The guilt born in the employer’s soul and he start trying to help his employee giving what to do: he use it as a driver, leads him to a family reunion to do the roast, and finally lends a great horse to run the “raid” and make a big gamble for him.

The Paths of my father (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Brésil
  • Vietnam

Director: 

Mauricio Osaki

Synopsis: 

10 year old Vy, North Vietnamese girl, is very close with her grandmother, whom she spends her afternoons with selling street food. She knows very little about her mother, who died a long time ago, and has a distant relationship with her father, who transports people and goods from the countryside to Hanoi’s open market in his passenger truck. But when Vy’s grandmother suddenly passes away, Lim, her father, has no other choice than to take his daughter with him over the weekend as his helper. Set against the colorless landscapes of the harsh Vietnamese winter, The Paths of My Father is the story of Vy venturing out for the first time on an important journey with her father through the countryside of Northern Vietnam. The journey will bring them to the border of Laos and Thailand, where her father has some unusual business to deal with. Meanwhile, little Vy is on her own personal quest to discover more about her mysterious family background. Throughout the journey, as both father and daughter are forced to deal with some harsh realities about the nature of work and family values, the distant and tense relationship between the two begins to change.

Todos os mortos / All the Dead Ones (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Brésil

Director: 

Caetano Gotardo
Marco Dutra

Synopsis: 

Set in the final months of the nineteenth century and the very beginning of the twentieth, All the dead ones is the story of the decline of a family in São Paulo, from the point of view of its three women: the mother, Isabel, and her daughters Maria and Ana. After the death of their maid Josefina – a former black slave back from the times when the family lived in the coffee farm – the notion of “home” seems to stop making sense. Isabel gets sick and does not get better. She seems to have only a few months to live. Maria, a nun and teacher, has little time to devote to the house. She puts her sister Ana in charge. But Ana is a strange, quiet and lonely girl who was never able to get married. As time goes by, Ana develops an obsessive relationship with the memories of the family farm and the slaves who lived there. Their ghosts come back to haunt her. Also, the three women miss Jorge, the father, who left them in the city to work for the Italians who purchased the old farm. The women know, deep down inside, that he will never return. The film is set around three big Brazilian holidays: Independence Day, Day of the Dead and Carnival. Unable to share the euphoria that comes with the modernization of the city of São Paulo, Isabel, Ana and Maria inexorably approach illness and madness.

Un argentino in Palestina (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Argentine
  • Royaume-Uni

Director: 

Rodrigo Vasquez

Synopsis: 

Rodrigo Vázquez is an Argentine that has worked as a war correspondent in the Arab-Israeli war front for 12 years. He documented the horrors of that war not only from the point of view of the anonymous civilian victims, but also from the perspective of the Islamic militiamen and the generals, soldiers and officers of the Israeli Army. In October 2006, Rodrigo began to feel the first symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He left his work in the area of Gaza and returned home to confront the memory of what he’d seen. He had difficulties sleeping, felt depressed, had panic attacks. Now that he’s condition is cured, Rodrigo wants to return to Gaza to wrap a journey he began 12 years ago, at the beginning of the so-called war on terror against islamic extremists. .This time, it’ll be not a fact-finding trip, but a private, intimite human journey to the many people he’s met during a decade of war. This film takes a unique look at the war in Israel-Palestine through life-stories that span a decade from a Latin American viewpoint. In doing so it reveals a hidden threat that links the fates of both Latin America and the Middle East.

Un petit bout d'Afrique (EN)

Selection: 

  • Cinéma en développement 9 / 2014

Type: 

Fiction

Format: 

Long-métrage

Country: 

  • Bolivie

Director: 

Yohan Laffort

Production company: 

Synopsis: 

Who knows the black population of Bolivia ? Reduced today at only a few thousand people scattered in the "Yungas" villages , the Afro-Bolivians are descendants of former slaves, decimated by thousands in the silver mines of Potosi. Nowadays, they are mostly small farmers and share their territory with the Aymara Indians, cultivating like them coca and coffee. They were, until recently, completely unknown to everyone, even non-existent in the constitution of Bolivia, isolated victims of racism, at the lowest of the social ladder. But for last ten years, notably under the impetus of their music, saya, delivered to date, they are eager to take their destiny in hand and throw their weight to reach a true recognition and regain their pride as a real people of Bolivia.