Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Víctor Erice y Manoel de Oliveira inaugurarán el Festival de Roma

Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Víctor Erice y Manoel de Oliveira inaugurarán el Festival de Roma

por - Críticas
20 Sep, 2012 02:04 | Sin comentarios

Sin tiempo de traducir la noticia -recién salida del horno- se las subo completa aquí en inglés. CENTRO HISTORICO, que inaugurará la sección CinemaXXI del Festival de Roma, es un trabajo conjunto de cuatro cortos dirigidos nada menos que por Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Victor Erice y Manoel de Oliveira. Las fotos que se publican […]

Sin tiempo de traducir la noticia -recién salida del horno- se las subo completa aquí en inglés. CENTRO HISTORICO, que inaugurará la sección CinemaXXI del Festival de Roma, es un trabajo conjunto de cuatro cortos dirigidos nada menos que por Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Victor Erice y Manoel de Oliveira. Las fotos que se publican aquí son las que acompañan a la nota que el diario español EL MUNDO publicó sobre este proyecto. La nota, de Carlos Reviriego, puede ser consultada, aquí (en castellano). Abajo, los detalles de la película y del presidente del jurado, en inglés.

The world premiere of the film Centro Histórico by Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Victor Erice and Manoel de Oliveira will open CinemaXXI, the new section in the programme which the Rome Film Festival (November 9 – 17, 2012) dedicates to the exploration of new trends and new languages in international cinema. Heading the jury of CinemaXXI will be Douglas Gordon (Glasgow, 1966), one of the most important visual artists of his generation. Winner of the prestigious “Turner Prize” at the young age of 30, his works are on exhibit in the major galleries and the most important museums in the world, from the MoCA in Los Angeles to the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, from the MoMA in New York to the Tate Gallery in London.

Centro Histórico is a film made jointly by four directors, one of the projects developed for “Guimarães 2012 European Capital of Culture”. Part one, entitled “O Tasqueiro”, was written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki. The Finnish director is the author of films such as Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989), The Man without a Past (Mies vailla menneisyyttä, winner of the Grand Prix of the Jury at Cannes in 2002), Lights in the Dusk (Laitakaupungin valot, 2006) and Le Havre (2011); in “O Tasqueiro” he retrieves atmospheres and stylistic elements reminiscent of his previous works, as he delicately tells the story of a day in the life of a lonely barman in the historic city centre of Guimarães.

The second segment of Centro Histórico, “Lamento da Vida Jovem”, was entrusted to Pedro Costa, the author of Bones (Ossos,1997, winner of the award for Best Photography in Venice in 1997), In Vanda’s Room (No quarta da Vanda, 2000, in competition at the Locarno Film Festival in 2000) and Memories directed with Eugène Green (Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival in 2007). In the part that he wrote and directed, the Portuguese director returns to the figure of Cape Verdean Ventura, the main character in the film Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha, 2006), in the surrealistic space of an elevator that becomes a place in which to deal with memory.

Victor Erice – the director of The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena, 1973), The South (El Sur, 1983) and The Quince Tree Sun (El sol del membrillo, 1992), which won the critics’ award at the Cannes Film Festival, wrote and directed the segment entitled “Vidros Partidos”, in which he explores the spaces of the former Rio Vizela spinning and textile mill, one of the largest textile industries in Europe, founded in the mid-nineteenth century and shut down in 2002. With the sensitivity that distinguishes all of his films, Erice gathers eyewitness accounts from the mill’s former employees, testifying to the transformation of an industrial class that is progressively disappearing.
Manoel de Oliveira wrote and directed the final episode “O Conquistador, Conquistado”. The work of this hundred-year old director, considered to be the most important living Portuguese film director and one of the most significant filmmakers in the history of world cinema, spans across the entire Twentieth century, from Labor on the Douro River (DouroFaina Fluvial) in 1931 to the great successes of the Eighties and Nineties The Satin Slipper (Le soulier de satin, 1985), Abraham’s Valley (Vale Abraão,1993), and Voyage to the Beginning of the World (Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo, 1993) to name just a few, all the way to the present day in films such as Eccentricities of a Blond-haired Girl (Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura, 2009)or The Strange Case of Angelica (O estrahno caso de Angelica, 2010)In his segment of Centro Histórico, de Oliveira tells the ironic story of a new “conquest”, about a group of tourists that “conquers” the historical city centre of Guimarães.

 

SYNOPSIS

Centro Histórico (Historic Centre)

As we toured through modern Guimarães, the founding city of Portugal, we wondered: “What stories does it have to tell?” The answer to this question came to us via the voices of four filmmakers with unique visions of cinema, Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Victor Erice and Manoel de Oliveira, who worked together in the making of this film. Things are not what they seem at first: the multiple dimensions of the story are generated by both reality and fiction.

 

CINEMAXXI JURY PRESIDENT

Douglas Gordon

Born in Glasgow in 1966, Douglas Gordon  is one of the most important all-around visual artists of his generation. Over the course of his career, he has worked in different mediums: video installations, films, photography, objects and texts. In 1996, at the age of just 30, he received the “Turner Prize”, one of the major British awards for contemporary art, and in 1997 he represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale. From the start, Gordon has been interested in a dual form of communication, verbal expression and images in motion, and he first attracted attention for his large-scale video installations and his texts, printed on the walls of the exhibition spaces, in the most surprising locations. Over the last fifteen years, the artist has exhibited in the world’s leading museums and art galleries, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2001), the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (2006), the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which devoted a retrospective to Gordon in 2006; the Tate in London (2010), and the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2011). One of the best-known and most important works by the Scottish artist is “24 Hour Psycho”, during which one of the iconic classics of film history, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, is screened with no sound on a large screen at the speed of two frames a second, so that it takes an entire day to show the film from beginning to end. Gordon made his directorial debut in 2005 with the film Zidane: A Portrait of the 21st Century, co-directed with Philippe Parréno and presented out of competition at Cannes. His more recent works include K. 364 – A Journey by Train, which screened at the 67th Venice International Film Festival in the Orizzonti section, and a contribution to the project “Rebel”. InK. 364 – A Journey by Train, the Scottish artist retraces the journey of two musicians of Jewish origin who return to the land their parents fled to perform. Their journey ends in the concert hall of Warsaw, for a performance of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major (k. 364). For the “Rebel” project – a film installation created by James Franco – Douglas Gordon, Harmony Korine, Paul McCarthy, Ed Ruscha, and Aaron Young reworked the film Rebel Without a Cause by Nicholas Ray using painting, sculpture, photography, drawings, and video.