Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires Ministerio de Cultura

By Section


Little BAFICIto top

The section that features a programming line-up for the children at the Festival, will host the premieres of several films and local shorts in Argentina. It will also showcase a selection of shorts from the “El mate” Workshop, which is a school in Buenos Aires that has been making films with children for twenty-four years. Furthermore, this section will host a special activity: Candide and the Animated Sayings, which will feature screenings of Argentine animated shorts with live music written, orchestrated and directed by Gabriel Chwojnik and played by the Children and Youth Orchestras from the Department for Social Inclusion of the Ministry of Education of the City of Buenos Aires. The activity will be held at Teatro 25 de Mayo and entrance will be free.

Competition / Cinema of the Futureto top

The Cinema of the Future Competition, which honors the works by young filmmakers who stand out for their uniqueness of vision and innovation, includes a selection of 20 films.

Competition / Aregntine Shortsto top

The Argentine short film program of this 13th Bafici, outlined together with Sergio Wolf, is structured, as always, in a Competitive Selection and a big parallel Short Films Exhibition. In the first one, we present a careful and heterogeneous selection of eighteen works that are having here their international and national premieres. Since the Argentine short film production is varied, attractive and abundant, the parallel Exhibition intends to expand the window so more of them can shed light on the festival screens. In both cases –Exhibition and Competition– we highlight the quality and diverse techniques, genres, origins, schools, and views on cinema and the world. Once again, their features are risk, search, renewal and charm. VB & ES.

Competition / Argentine Official Selectionto top

If Argentine cinema has a typical feature, that is its ability to surprise us. But that surprise is not caused only by the hybrid quality of Argentine culture. As it happens in this case, it’s also a consequence of its diverse perspectives on cinema. Like every year, this Argentine competition features films that even if they weren’t conceived to establish a dialog, they actually do: either because all selections imply connections between things or because their materials, storytelling, characters, and styles both differ and connect to each other, setting up a widerange landscape of aesthetic and production.

Competition / Argentine Official Selection - Out of competitionto top

Competition / International Official Selectionto top

The International Competition consists of 19 (nineteen) films, including several debut films, by directors from Germany, Brazil, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Serbia, Guatemala, Argentina, Uruguay, United States, Israel, and Japan; which will compete for the following awards: Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay.

Retros & Focus / Focus Alberto Yaccelinito top

That voice is the only thing pointing out to us the presence of an “I” that can be discreet up to the point of trying to hide beneath shyness. It’s a voice that also makes us realize that sometimes filmmakers have another family apart from the one they’re related to by blood: the one his characters make up. Maybe those characters were born for Yaccelini to film them.

Retros & Focus / Focus Andrei Ujicato top

Ujica made all these films without the need of grabbing a camera, since practically all images existed previously (and the ones produced for certain parts of Out of the Present were taken by the astronauts themselves). His work is mostly structural: the recycling of other people’s material, integrating circumstantial images from different sources into a bigger vision for which they hadn’t been originally intended.

Focos y Retros / Foco Daniel Schmidto top

In 1992, aged 51, Daniel Schmid created Off Season, a film that is like a key to his oeuvre and his life. A grown-up man, Valentin, returns to the place of his childhood: an old hotel in the Swiss Alps. Memories flash up unexpectedly; his past manifests itself as a second reality level within the film. Just like in the old days, Valentin’s family move from room to room in the hotel –nomads in their own four walls– in line with the changing seasons. Without any actual shift of place, Off Season tells about journeys, journeys into the realm of dreams, fables and memories, something that Schmid was so well acquainted with through his own experience.

Retros & Focus / Focus David OReillyto top

Whether they’re fantasy hybrid animals or slightly anthropomorphic beings, OReilly’s characters carry an overwhelming existential burden; they are born, they suffer, they end up alone, get sick, and end up disappearing without leaving a trail.

Retros & Focus / Focus Gary Burnsto top

Tell me where you live and I’ll tell you how you live. That’s one of the topics of Gary Burns’ work. Living in artificial suburban cities (i.e., places without history implanted on territories where the only attraction is to be near a highway) generates its own way of life.

Retros & Focus / Focus Jacques Doillonto top

Relationships, sexuality, psychology, and human issues have always being both topics the French have been particularly sensible to, and big themes absorbed by their cinema. In that sense, maybe Jacques Doillon is not very different from his colleagues and countrymen. But right there where cinema begins to stare at itself and search for its own forms in an endless game of connections with other artistic disciplines, is where Doillon vivaciously resigns and sets up his own game. For him, it’s nothing less than a privileged access to the darkest corners of the soul and the intrinsic mystery of passion. A place where words have become part of magma-like dialogs; images are an intimate, suspended, and even claustrophobic place that highlight gestures, looks, and movements. The bodies (of both professional and non-professional actors) are shown in all of their immensity, clumsiness, violence, humor, and excess; the way they pronounce words; their accidental existence. This position seems to primarily intend to dissolve all distances: the ones existing between the actors and the point of view; between camera and emotions; and, especially, the one between people in space and time.

Retros & Focus / Focus Mafrouzato top

Filmed from 2001 to 2004 in the Alexandrian neighborhood of the title and edited over the course of the next six years, Emmanuelle Demoris’ precise, layered Mafrouza cycle is the type of multipart film one rarely sees nowadays. As we’ve moved decisively into an era of hasty content and shoddy Youtube aesthetics, a film with this many intertwining lives and stories, requiring far-sighted considerations made in both shooting and editing, is a downright miracle.

Retros & Focus / Focus Patricio Guzmánto top

Patricio Guzmán’s figure as a documentary filmmaker emerged in the mid 70s with the devastating force brought by the triptych organized under the single rebellious cry The Battle of Chile. The indelible mark the film left in the history of documentary filmmaking (not just in Latin America, but in the whole genre’s) also managed to live on until today.

Retros & Focus / Focus Sandro Aguilarto top

Portuguese cinema’s energy and talent in recent years has been championed by certain names that constantly headline the audience’s preferences: Miguel Gomes (Our Beloved Month of August, released in Buenos Aires last year), João Pedro Rodrigues (To Die Like a Man, released this year), Manuel Mozos (Ruinas), Hugo Vieira da Silva (Body Rice, Swans) or João Nicolau (A espada e a rosa) But it also holds other people who deserve more attention. In fact, there’s a common name behind many of these films (on top of them, thanks to them): Sandro Aguilar.

Retros & Focus / Focus PDV BAFICI Sessionto top

Here’s an idea: let festivals not just program films but also contribute to the making of those they would like to screen. Within our means in the Navarra International Documentary Film Festival’s Punto de Vista, we launched a production project in 2010 within the section Heterodocsias, which focuses on unknown Spanish cinema. With the name Proyecto X Films, Punto de Vista offers three young auteurs the chance to pitch a project to an expert committee that will select one of the three to be produced by the festival. Notes on Ephemeral, by Leon-born director Chus Domínguez is the first one that resulted from the project. He’s joined by two other short films the festival also produced in 2010 and were directed by Jem Cohen while he stayed in Pamplona, walking through the city and having conspiratorial conversations with Luce Vigo, the daughter of Jean Vigo and godmother of the festival since its first edition.

Retros & Focus / Focus Super 8to top

Against digital video’s pornographic exhibition of each and every small detail, the imperfect, grainy, and often dirty texture of Super 8 is a shelter for those who think the beating of the film as it goes through the camera and the projector’s window is a live, palpitating thing; and for those who believe the flames that spark when the film gets burned stand for something sacred. A passion that is still alive and we reveal today for those willing to find and share it.

Retros & Focus / Focus Thomas Imbachto top

Thomas Imbach likes taking risks. With each new film project, he moves into uncharted territory and consciously seeks a complex cinematographic challenge. How else could one explain his idea of making a film out of unspectacular day-to-day office activities in a Swiss financial institution (Well Done, 1994)? Or staging the mysterious murder/ suicide drama of Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian as a suggestive 90 minutes of sudden death (Happiness Is a Warm Gun, 2001)? Asked about his motivation for making specific films, Imbach once replied that he never planned his film topics in advance. “They always came to me in a flash. It‘s like being in love; you can‘t really explain why.”

Argentine Shorts Exhibition to top

Panoramato top

The Panorama section includes works that showcase the best in contemporary international cinema.

Panorama / Art and Apartto top

The section Art and Apart features films about talented people at the core of different artistic disciplines.

Panorama / Musicto top

The Music section features a strong presence of Argentine films. Some international standouts are Upside Down: The Creation Records Story (United Kingdom, 2010), by Danny O´Connor, which narrates the story of the emblematic British record label that signed bands from Jesus and Mary Chain to Primal Scream; and Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?) (U.S., 2010), by John Scheinfeld. ¿Qué sois ahora? (2011), by Mariano Goldrob, is a documentary about the band Pequeña Orquesta Reincidentes.

Panorama / Late Nightto top

The Late Night section line-up features works by directors such as Takashi Miike, with his 13 Assassins; Israeli Avishai Sivan, with the screening of The Wanderer, and the Australian Michael Henry with his film Blame. The Argentine work in this segment is brought by Pablo Oliverio, with the premiere of Un ovni sobre mi cama (2011).

Panorama / Careersto top

As a new feature this year, Careers, a segment dedicated to new films by acclaimed directors, will offer 3D screenings of the film Cave of Forgotten Dreams (France, 2010), by Werner Herzog.

Panorama / Careers / Human Rights Competitionto top

 

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