“Le cinéma, disait André Bazin,substitue à nos regards un monde quis’accorde à nos désirs” (Jean-Luc Godard, Le Mépris, 1963)
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, from September 2017 to September 2018, 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.
The theaters have lived their worst year. The box offices have collapsed. The independents have lived their worst year. The newspapers, magazines, digital media, television, commerce, retail and wholesale have all lived their worst year. In all areas, festivals and cultural events have been canceled. We get on with our lives, without much energy, without believing that we would be evolving to somehow win back the spaces that we have gradually lost...
We continue working with curatorial choices, bringing international films to the Brazilian market, releasing them commercially, and with great care, in the art house circuit, betting on the art, classics and independents films..., and on the cinema as a cultural experience with no limits and no conflicts; therefore, with such idea, we go on.
In 2018, Zeta Films turned 20. Acting as an independent foreign film distributor since 2013, Zeta has already released 59 features on the Brazilian market.
This year, an ungrateful battle has hung daily in the air, but we have found som encouragement in the legitimate social movements that seek to enhance the representativeness of women, transsexuals, blacks and other minorities, who struggle to find their place in a sordid world, filled with violent rightist setbacks, absurd speeches and divisions between the classes, even within the same ones. A sick politic. The friends were left with the conflicts. The true face of politics, right, left, center, has radicalized itself... Since we had never treated each other like that, the disputes, separations and quarrels became innumerable; energy has been spent in vain.
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.
(Nostalgia is a very common phenomenon in our culture nowadays, it has been enshrined as the ‘great universal feeling’ for the loss of everything: the street cinemas and the idea, distorted by fantasies of remembrance, that we used to have a better world. Nostalgia is indeed a universal feeling that, sometimes, in the face of the future, can sometimes paralyze us. While, in the face of the present, it accommodates us. We behave as if it was not possible to change anymore. Despite all the losses, it is understandable to celebrate a past that has been considered this good. But, are we not really falling short of the energy necessary to get out of such a place and to make it better here and now?)
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 (na excessively entrepreneurial word for such an unconventional business), 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 14 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 Argentinean Mariano Llinás, the Catalan Albert Serra, the Japanese Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 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 Hungarian Zsófia Szilágyi, the Polish Jagoda Szelc, the Mexican-Swiss Pablo Sigg and the Italian Fabrizio Ferraro.
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 strength of Latin American independence comes with Mariano Llinás and his Argentine film La Flor, which has 808 minutes (almost 14 hours). La Flor, shot over a 9 year period, presents four actresses – Pilar Gamboa, Elisa Carricajo, Laura Paredes and Valeria Correa – representing several characters, in different histories and genres. For Llinás the idea is that “viewers see various actresses’ careers unfolding before their eyes, as part of the same film. The idea is that one film should be a series of films, an era in the life of four people, and that cinema should be able to show this passing of time, this learning, this process”. La Flor will be exhibited in three parts, on different days.
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.
The ordinary/extraordinary in Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With an innate talent to simultaneously tell everyday and extraordinarily strange stories, the Japanese director of Happy Hour – a nearly 5-hour film, exhibited in Indie 2016 – is back with his new work Asako I & II. Released in the competition section of the Cannes Film Festival 2018, Asako I & II is based on a novel by the Japanese writer Tomoka Shibasaki, which attracted the director because of two specific points: the strangeness of a woman who falls in love with two men with the same face and the description of daily life.
3 young women with brilliant films Helena Wittmann, Zsófia Szilágyi 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. Zsófia Szilágyi’s One Day, which won the FIPRESCI award at the Critics’ Week at Cannes, portrays the routine of a woman-mother and the conflicts resulted from her dedication to work roles or to her three children, as well as the anguish caused by the suspicion that her husband is having an affair. 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
