FOTOGENIA 6 – Nine Glorious Days of Wonder, Talent and Imagination in Mexico City
FOTOGENIA INTERNATIONAL FILM POETRY & DIVERGENT NARRATIVES FESTIVAL, based out of Mexico City must now be the largest festival of its kind in the world. I was so fortunate to be able to go last year and this year Festival Director Chris Patch has excelled himself. From November 21st to the 30th every day is full of themed screenings, live and online, and where uniquely some films are very short and others up to twenty minutes. With curations creatively titled such as Fugaz – ‘Fleeting’, transient, ephemeral; Sacudida – ‘Shock’, shake, jolt, tremor; Asfixia – Asphyxia; Destierro ‘Exile’, Banishment, Uprooting (see Lebanese filmmaker Josef Khallouf’s Exiles, online), there are now 15 sections and many other screenings and performances.
As there are so many films this year and it has been impossible to narrow these down, I am going to focus mainly on a selection of performative films. Many of these are made in relation to an overwhelming fear or predicament; a suffering experienced or engendered by mankind. There are many approaches, such as the film Unseen by Helmie Stil and Sjaan Flikweert, where the underwater camera is close up on the face of a distressed woman, submerged under both real and metaphoric waves.
Unseen, Helmie Stil and Sjaan Flikweert
In Somber Tides Canadian director and choreographer Chantal Caron has created a startling elegiac environmentally aware work of art in film. Performing in remote locations, and filmed from above, dark fabrics billow out from the dancers over (disappearing) snow-covered landscapes. Amongst blizzard conditions the evocative movements suggest a lament for the loss of habitat and effectively the birds of the region. The message is profound and clear.
Somber Tides, Chantal Caron
Are You Crying is also dance-based, and sensitively and evocatively told by American multidisciplinary artist Marissa Brown. Wearing a glittery dress, she is positioned by a late-night empty road, where occasional cars pass. Her movements suggest a form of capture and release, of uncertainty, and lack of belonging. ‘It’s a desire to make beauty out of a time of grief, processing, and growth.’
Are You Crying, Marissa Brown
Observer, by Serbian videopoet Ana Pantic chillingly encapsulates the feeling of being a helpess watcher of how the world is imploding, as it is beset by war and planetary destruction. Beginning with the line ‘Maybe these are the last days’ we see a woman’s naked back with hair cascading down, as an overlay of a tank seems to pass over her. The very stillness of the body combined with the graphic images reinforces the larger picture. ‘In the Beginning was the Word … and the Word was with God’ as if we are in the hands of fate and a God that must now come to help us against the evil in the world.
Observer, Ana Pantic
Two short films I would also like to mention are Over Her Head (Sobre su Cabeza) by talented Mexican cinematographer and director Fernando Mol where a girl climbs to the roof to escape her problems: ‘In the Total Darkness Poetry is Still There’, and What Do You Do With Everything You Feel (Qué Haces Con Todo Aquello que Sientes?) by innovative Mexican director Ale Nuño, which cleverly disseminates the tensions and desires around making a telephone call.
Over Her Head, Fernando Mol
What Do You Do With Everything You Feel, Ale Nuño
With man bonded to his computer, Life Machine by Australian artist, poet and filmmaker Mark Niehus reminds us that humans are now inseparable from our machines. We trust and share our space with these objects that also guide and form us, in an endless vortex of searching and finding. You might ask, ultimately, do we need a ‘real’ human in this performance?
Life Machine, Mark Niehus
Equally, Martin Gerigk’s Demi-Demons postulates a strange hybrid world that is ersatz reality – a sort of AI surrealist dream from animated vintage photos and in collage form. It is described as an ‘essay film about the contradictions of contemporary existence, which separate us from our natural instincts, opening abysses within us’. Like Life Machine it also opens up questions about where we situate ourselves in our real v. audiovisual, streaming existence. Perhaps we function 50% online, where our thought processes and methods of understanding are well attuned to navigating these always enticing waters. Here, storytelling images can be outrageous and startling, and therefore memorable with creative permeability. Gerigk not only directs audiovisual art and experimental films but is also a professional contemporary music composer. As such his work is strongly focused on the ‘inherent synesthetic connections of sound and visual perceptions’.
Demi-Demons, Martin Gerigk
There are also full-length screenings such as: Vita Altra (Otra Vida) Another Life by Italian director Davide Belotti and project-based films such as Explosives by Paula Alves and Coraline Claude. Another Life is a fascinating experimental feature that is uniquely experimental in its geographic locations and filming approach. Taking 16 months to make, between Italy, Belgium, Lanzarote and Sicily, over 170 actors and members of the public took part. Whilst it appears like a random sequence of scenes that have to be decoded, to quote the website: ‘A Sicilian man confronts his past as two strangers embody his conflicting desires, blending fantasy and reality’.
In Programme 8 Fortalezas – (‘Strengths’ or strongholds, fortresses, citadels) Paula Alves and Coraline Claude have created the feminist project Explosives. Alves is a multimedia artist, performer, filmmaker and art therapist who investigates the relationship between the unconscious and its forms of somatization in the body. Claude is an actress and director who often uses poetry in her research. Under her, nine women studied the poetry anthology “Je transporte des explosifs. On les appelle des mots” with feminist poems by: Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldúa & Cherríe Moraga, bell hooks, Dorothy Allison, Robin Morgan, Marge Piercy, Alice Walker, Paula Gunn Allen, Rita Mae Brown and more. Each woman on the project reinterpreted a poem which became the film Explosives.
Explosives, Paula Alves and Coraline Claude
There will also be a selection of online Zoom discussions for participants. I am looking forward to taking part on Saturday November 23rd. I would also like to add that I am honoured that Programme 2 – Sacudida (Shock, jolt, tremor) includes my own latest film Vuelo / Flight. It is an autobiographical poem and film about my mother who suffered depression, and my role as cleaner and gardener from the age of five. It is the prologue to my upcoming poetry collection The Unexhibited.
Flight / Vuelo, Sarah Tremlett
Please do take the trip to Mexico. You have to experience FOTOGENIA at least once in your lifetime!!!
Please go to the side bar on the Home Page for the link to the festival.
