We are not looking back, even when everything leads us to believe that we have already lived better times, in all senses. We fear to be obsessed with our current politics filled with obstacles to the cultural phenomenon, and have deplored for a whole year, what has happened to our country. We have not been able to effectively change anything since... and continue to whine.
We feel a slight tremor when uttering the word Brazil. We are full of traumas, nightmares, sleepless nights, as well as loaded with moral, financial, aesthetic and cultural debts: we, Brazilians, are suffering. Right now, we hate our own image.
We could simply end it all – what is an Indie Festival, when we have such a scenario? —, and follow other paths, who knows? But... It is not for nostalgia, neither for a political or intellectual mission that we are here today.
Indie Festival is still alive, here today, for an ontological reason. We were and are something beyond ourselves, beyond the individual, beyond a company, something that has become a public phenomenon, which generates desires, listens, speaks, and has an importance that is not vain, egocentric or purely egomaniacal; it is, rather, a collective essence. Even as a private festival, we are still collective. Because our choices begin to reflect in the gaze and senses of the others: an 18-year-old project, conceptual and inquisitive. We keep receiving messages, little notes, comments, and requests: “Do not die, do not end, do not cease to exist.”
As if this existence was a choice? Such existence does not break in this way, because it craves a desire that is not individual.
And so, we go on... and if we think that we actually have a mission, perhaps, in terms of our Festival the word, “mission” has a half mythic, half disruptive sense, because, as says one of Godard’s character “there are no rules in cinema”. “There are no rules and that’s why people still love cinema...” And the people love the independent, art and classic films. These same people are tired of commercial films, malls, banality, pastiche, as well as of the whole Netflix thing, living room sofa and bed. These people still want the streets and want to rescue the emotions that belong to the movie theaters, screen, presence, smells, buzz echoed, conversation in the queues, strong coffee, controversial opinions. The people want to live the life of which cinema is a fundamental part. And a festival is all of that with certain intensity. And so, it will be.
The cinema is always in transformation... the Indie festival has carefully selected 13 directors, with films from 13 different countries, to reflect what the world cinema produces in its more free, radical, artistic, conceptual and experimental forms. Here we have the open space of a film festival that needs to connect the viewer to such aesthetic and mutant world. Curated by Daniella Azzi, Gustavo Beck and Francesca Azzi.
At the 2018 Indie Festival, the Philippine Lav Diaz, the Chinese Hu Bo, Bi Gan and Liang Ying, the Catalan Albert Serra, the Austrian Johann Lurf and the American veteran James Benning are the ones who represent such great energy and transformative inspiration. The new talents are represented by the German Helena Wittman, the Polish Jagoda Szelc, the Mexican-Swiss Pablo Sigg and the Italian Fabrizio Ferraro. For INDIE in Belo Horizonte, we invited two great authors: Cao Guimarães and Tiago Mata Machado.
The magician Lav DIAZ, enshrined by the long and original narratives that he exhibits in the worldwide independent cinema, transmutes his own works in each new creation. Season Of The Devil (230 minutes) has a very unique way of telling a story; it is also extremely up-to-date in terms of politics and sensitive in terms of poetry, besides being an unusual experience that slips into pain and oppression. Recognized by the long duration of his films, Diaz has said several times over the years that he does not govern his works by time, but rather by space and nature. His rock opera, which has premiered at Berlinale this year and have never be seen in Brazil before, makes its debut at the 2018 Indie Festival. Season Of The Devil is a political musical (Diaz composed all of its songs) thatreflects the dictatorship and the dark times experienced by his country, the Philippines.
The social dismantling comes with the young Chinese writer and director, Hu Bo, in one of the most important films of the year: An Elephant Sitting Still. Hu Bo committed suicide in 2017, at 29 years old, shortly after completing his first and last feature, which is a manifesto of his existence. In this colossal and unique work, almost four hours long, Hu leads us through a day in the lives of four residents of a small city in the north of China. “The truly valuable things lie in the cracks of the world, and not pessimistically so.”
The French critic Pierre Rissient, who died this year just before the Cannes Film Festival, wrote about the fantastic preciousness of BI GAN “Now, seven months after the heart of Hu Bo, director of An elephant sitting still, tragically stooped beating, Bi Gan’s last film, Long Day’s Journey Into Night emerges. I go as far as to speak of a generation of fiery poetry.” For Rissient, Hu Bo and Bi Gan would be the eighth generation of the Chinese cinema. The young Chinese director Bi Gan, never seen in Brazil before, is present here with Long Day’s Journey Into Night, premiered in the competition at the 2018 Cannes Festival. Perfectionist and meticulous, Gan has created a novel, noir, sci-fi about a man who searches for the woman he loves.
The Cruel Truth with Liang Ying. In 2012, the Chinese government chased the director Liang Ying and his family because they wanted to prohibit the international exhibition of his film When Night Falls. Screened at the Indie Festival in that year, it tells the story of a young man who kills six policemen and is sentenced to death by the Chinesegovernment – which has issued his death sentence without respecting the legal formalities –, as well as the story of his mother’s struggle for justice. (His second feature, The Second Half, has been exhibited in Indie 2006). Liang Ying has since lived in exile in Hong Kong. After a five-year period, Ying released, this year in Locarno, A Family Tour, which is na autobiographical story about a Chinese film director and refugee who goes on a pretended sightseeing trip to Taiwan, along with her husband and son, to meet her mother, whom she had not seen in years, Liang Ying is on a fight for his artistic freedom.
2 young women with brilliant films Helena Wittmann and Jagoda Szelc make their Brazilian debut at Indie 2018. Helena Wittmann’s Drift brings the sea as the protagonist to tell a story permeated by gestures and silences as a means of approaching love, friendship and the distance that keeps people apart. A sensory, sentimental experience. Jagoda Szelc makes her debut with a genre film: Tower. A Bright Day., which won the Best Film First Prize at the Polish Film Festival. It is a thriller centered in a small Polish town where the family meets for a first communion.
3 veteran artists and their experimental films Johann Lurf, James Benning and Albert Serra. The stars in the cinema. Not the actors/movie stars, but the stars represented in the night sky of many films. In , the Austrian Johann Lurf compiled scenes of starry skies lifted from 550 films (the director wants it to be quoted by the symbol, not by the word Star). It premiered at the Vienna Film Festival in 2017 and has been exhibited in Sundance, Rotterdam and several other festivals.
A static camera, a particular environment and the time. Two artists and different performances. Indie brings L. Cohen, by the celebrated American director James Benning, with a view of an Oregon farm field, the passing moon and a sunset, all incorporated by a Leonard Cohen song. L. Cohen won the Grand Prize at the Cinéma du Réel festival. With Roi Soleil, the Catalan director Albert Serra returns to the character of King Louis XIV, who was also in his previous work The Death of Louis XIV. Away goes Jean Pierre Léaud, and here comes Lluís Serrat, a non-actor who has appeared in many of Serra’s films. The pain and death of the king are presented as a performance, in a gallery, in real time. It received the Grand Prize of the International Competition at the FID Marseille.
2 new directors: Pablo Sigg and Fabrizio Ferraro with an original cinema. The Mexican-Swiss director Pablo Sigg goes to an Aryan colony founded by Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister, located in Nueva Germania, Paraguay, to shoot the two surviving descendants who still live in the area. Lamaland is the record of this isolated world, na impressive film created as if the director had become mimetized to that solitary routine. In Les Unwanted De Europa, the Italian director Fabrizio Ferraro portrays antifascists, foreigners and Jews fleeing occupied France through an escape route in the Pyrenees. The philosopher Walter Benjamin is one of them.
We thank all of those who have supported us during these 18 years of our existence!
Francesca Azzi e Daniella Azzi
Indie Festival Curators
