Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires Festivales de Buenos Aires

Collection “Premier jour”

april 14
13:00h
agotadas

Alianza Francesa de Buenos Aires

 

Film information

Director ← [ + info ]

Fernand Melgar

Fernand Melgar was born into a family of Spanish unionists exiled in Tangiers, Morocco. His parents smuggled him with them when they migrated to Switzerland as seasonal laborers in 1963. In the early Eighties, he dropped his business studies in order to found, together with several friends, the Cabaret Orwell in Lausanne, which would soon become a Mecca for Switzerland’s French-speaking underground culture. Later, he created the internationally renowned rock music venue La Dolce Vita, also in Lausanne, which screened a video-art program. A self-taught, freelance film director and producer, in 1983 he began compiling various experimental films and iconoclastic interviews for television. In 1985 he joined Climage, a collective of independent and engaged filmmakers and one of Switzerland’s most prolific documentary production companies today.

There’s a common topic in all of Melgar’s documentaries: injustice. The thread comes from Melgar’s own experiences as an immigrant, filtered through an anarchist-unionist sensibility committed to the defense of social values. “I have inside me a family mythology that’s also a reality. I feel a deep respect for human beings. I have the opportunity to make strong statements; I share that with those who don’t have a right to speak”. And we can see this in all of Melgar’s documentaries: a respect that reveals conceptual honesty and visual transparence in how he displays his topics, which seem to insist on the tensions that lie beneath the apparently peaceful land of Switzerland, from immigration issues to work and health policies –which avoids any demagogy and looks at things “as they are”. With its emotional –yet never tearful– intensity backing his ethical perspective, Fernand Melgar’s cinema lives up to that thing we call cinema of reality.

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