New Latin American Cinema in New York
Neighboring Scenes, the weeklong showcase of new Latin American cinema opening tomorrow at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is not a greatest hits compilation. With a selection of thirteen features, many of them preceded by shorts, organizers Carlos Gutiérrez and Cecilia Barrionuevo have set out to introduce New Yorkers to a slate of promising talents alongside new work from a few names that may already be familiar: Federico Veiroj (A Useful Life, The Apostate), for example, who will open the series with Belmonte; Carlos Reygadas (Japón, Post Tenebras Lux), whose Our Time is the centerpiece screening; and Eduardo Williams (The Human Surge), presenting a program of short films, including the North American premiere of Parsi, an immersive project made in collaboration with poet Mariano Blatt.
Javier Belmonte (Gonzalo Delgado) is an artist of some renown in Montevideo, where he’s preparing for a major retrospective while juggling the demands of his elderly parents, his ex-wife, and their daughter. “What’s most remarkable about Veiroj is that his love of low-amplitude behavior and the consequent subversion of narrative are inextricable from his vigorous formal experimentation, which can be called experimental only if it is regarded in a narrative context,” writes Dan Sallitt for the Notebook. “Indeed, it’s barely an exaggeration to say that every scene in the film appears to be conceived around a formal flourish.” Veiroj is “Uruguay’s leading auteur at this point,” argues Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope, and Belmonte, “a film about a male artist who values his family life as much as his art, if not more,” is “not only refreshing: it’s genuinely sexy.”
Following its premiere in Venice, Our Time split the critics in Toronto. Introducing his interview with Reygadas for the Notebook, Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal argues that this study of an open marriage between ranchers Juan (Reygadas) and Esther (editor Natalia López, Reygadas’s real-life partner) is “more than an analysis or narration of a love triangle.” It’s “a cinematographic and linguistic exploration of the intangible and ineffable.” Reygadas agrees: “There are things that don’t want to be de- or encoded.” And talking to André Shannon at Rough Cut, Reygadas reveals himself to be a big fan of Lucrecia Martel and Claire Denis.
For Ela Bittencourt at Hyperallergic, a highlight of last year’s Mostra de Cinema de Tiradentes was Ewerton Belico and Samuel Marotta’s debut feature Outer Edge, a portrait of the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. Shot by Leonardo Feliciano (Araby), it’s “formally beautiful, with luscious nocturnal cinematography and monologues that sound as if they were lifted from a Greek tragedy.” At the Notebook, Bittencourt recommends Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León’s The Wolf House, a nightmare rooted in Chilean history. It’s “a decidedly adult stop-motion animation, whose psychological portent is mysterious and dense,” writes Bittencourt, “while its imaginative use of puppetry and bold animated design creates a world entirely its own, relatively rarely seen in contemporary cinema.”
