Punto de Vista announced December 12 first details of the programme for its nineteenth edition, to be held from February 24 February to March 1 in Pamplona, Spain. These include the contents of its Focus, Lan and X Films sections. The festival is promoted by the government of Navarre and organised by the public company NICDO.
Focus: Frans Van de Staak
Punto de Vista presents the first international retrospective devoted to Frans van de Staak (Amsterdam, 1943-2001), filmmaker and visual artist. In each of his films, van de Staak rearranges the traditional elements of film – dialogue, mise-en-scène, performance, editing – in a structured and often humorous exploration of spaces and acts of language. Thanks to collaboration with Eye Filmmuseum, this Focus, programmed by Carlos Saldaña and Manuel Asín, will be attended by Stefan van de Staak, the film-maker’s son and collaborator in some of his last films, and will show in 16mm eleven of the director’s twenty-five films, accompanying the publication of the first monograph on his work.
Focus: Anne-Marie Faux (festival notes)
The melancholic, reflective work of Anne-Marie Faux (Montfermeil, 1959), is presented as a set of film diaries in which the filmmaker’s voice guides us on the paths of memory – a collective, political memory marked by successive wars and revolutions, and a personal memory that evokes childhood, film, music and literature. This almost complete retrospective of her work, attended by the filmmaker herself and programmed by Andrea Franco, will feature her four feature-length films for the first time in Spain: Hic Rosa, partition botanique (2007); Face au vent, partition buissonnière (2010); Le bruit du temps, Messaoud (2014) and Ostinato. Notes pour la Méditerranée (2014).
Focus: Adiós a los animales
Adiós a los animales is, as the title suggests, a film series about the disappearance of animals. Over five sessions we see different kinds of relationship between humans and animals (from first encounters, amazed or fearful, to impure and simple exploitation, taking in games, ritual and fable), and also the life of different animals with no direct relations with humans. The focus presents 10 cinematographic adventures and misadventures starring penguins, seals, whales, snakes, elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, squirrel monkeys, frogs, lions, hyaenas, gulls, woodpeckers and muskox.
Lan section
Lan (meaning “work” or “job” in Basque) is the section dealing with creative and production processes in documentary film, and will comprise the opening session of the festival, with a screening of the recently digitalised Tent City, an unknown classic of Cuban cinema, with its director Miñuca Villaverde. Lan: Termites section will feature work from the emerging Spanish scene.
The Lan section also presents two talks about AI practices applied to documentary film. The first is ‘Models of Resonance’, in which curator and researcher into visual culture Antonio Somaini (Sorbonne Nouvelle) and artistic collective Estampa discuss the scope of AI in contemporary visual culture. In the second talk, three machines for seeing – the ATS-3 satellite, the CHIRP algorithm and the PRITHVI model – are analysed by digital technology researcher and artist Guillem Serrahima and language philosophy and science researcher Ramón del Buey.
Finally, X Films, in collaboration with Centro Huarte, invites filmmaker and visual creator Pablo Casanueva to attend an artistic residency to shoot a documentary essay project in Navarre in 2025. Initial results of this research will be shown at this year’s festival, together with previous work of Casanueva.
The X Films 2024 project Diez pequeñas historias y unos créditos by Celia Viada Caso will also premiere at Punto de Vista.
