There are few plans more beautiful in an autumnal Córdoba than going to the Cosquín International Independent Film Festival. Relax in the seats of the Adalberto Nogués Microcinema for a nap to see what Ficic surprises us with, and chat with makers and performers afterwards. Buy a coffee on the go and accompany it with European snacks, before entering the next function.
Far from being just for movie buffs, it is a pleasure to enjoy both their feature films and the shorts in competition as well as observe the dynamics of Cordobans and Coscoínos who religiously attend to enjoy a unique opportunity to see different cinema. Neighbors, film students or friends, teenagers, young people and adults, who go every year or for the first time to enjoy a movie.
Different from what mainstream, but no less accessible for everyone. Therefore, it is worth emphasizing that it is “exquisitely” curated by critic Roger Koza. This is what the Spanish director Meritxell Colell Aparicio said last year and, from here, we agree.
“The experience we have of the world today is an experience that is made through the image. It seems very important to me that there are other ways to do this and that they are not the ones that are usually the most experienced, social networks. When we talk about cinema, the cinema that is released in large theaters, which also resembles the series that are on all platforms. It is a common image language or at least very similar. So I think that film festivals are the spaces in which there have to be other possibilities of experiencing the world through other ways of conceiving images,” says Koza.
Ficic 2024, thirteenth edition
Ficic has survived the pandemic and will survive these times in which so much is said about cinema, and culture in general, only from a commercial point of view, reducing art miserably, as if those who make it and those who enjoy it ate , we breathed and sweated money.
This year, in its 13th edition, the event takes place from May 2 to 5 in Cosquín. In their feature film competition, they are The palisiada, by Philip Sotnychenko (Ukraine 2023); The indefinite thingsby María Aparicio (Argentina 2023); The lands of heavenby Pablo García Canga (Spain 2023); The islandby Damien Manivel (France 2023), and Reasby Lola Arias (Argentina-Germany-Switzerland 2024).
Among other titles to watch, for example, the Córdoba-Spanish horror and fantasy The effort (directed by Augusto Sinay), inspired by a story by Leopoldo Lugones, which has just won best screenplay and film at the Fantaspoa International Festival in Porto Alegre, Brazil; and which has local talents such as Cristóbal López Baena, Eva Bianco, Maximiliano Gallo, Diego Haas, among others.
The complete schedule with days and times of the performances can be consulted on the website cosquinfilmfest.com (tickets can also be purchased there).
The Ficic and the context
“All programming lives in a context, all programming is the daughter of a history and a present, because cinema is also the art of the present. Today cinema is under suspicion, especially from a mysteriously state enunciation, regarding a state administration that understands that the State is an illicit association or other types of metaphors…”, Koza begins when asked about curating for a Film Festival. Independent Cinema in Argentina, in the midst of a panorama of cuts to culture.
And he develops: “Cinema is under suspicion because it is unduly believed that films, especially in Argentina, have practiced something like a kind of indirect indoctrination through their aesthetics, which is absolutely demonstrable that this is not the case. Among other things, there is a film by the daughter of former president Mauricio Macri who received money from Incaa, or the films of Campanella himself, are films that would not respond to that, or the films of the Cohn-Duprats, absolutely associated with the conceptual universe of the world that today is called “libertarian”. It is very easy to demonstrate that there has been a diversity of forms and themes in Argentine cinema from ’94 onwards. Furthermore, there is a great lack of knowledge and lack of rigor in thinking that the concept of quantitative is a concept that justifies itself as a way of thinking about the arrival of a film.”
To give an example, Koza recalls a Hollywood tank: “That is to say, if a film was seen by more than 30,000, 40,000, 60,000 people, it would seem that it would already imply a criterion of legitimacy, but the truth is that There are films that may have attracted half a million people at their premiere, for example, Bathtubs 3: almighty, and was never seen again after its premiere. Films that at the time may have been attended by 2,500, two thousand people, as may be the case of Freedom, by Lisandro Alonso, over the last 24 years, since its premiere at the Cannes Festival, it has continued to be seen around the world and continues to be seen in Argentina. In fact, right now, an entire Lisandro Alonso retrospective is playing in Los Angeles.”
This year’s opening film is socialist realism, Raúl Ruiz-Valeria Sarmiento, 1968-2023. Koza assures that there is no attempt at playful provocation when choosing an inauguration with that title, but he takes it as a compliment that the idea was suggested to him.
Of course, the justification goes much further. The critic says that Ruiz is to cinema as Borges is to literature, and also says that this film was completed, after the director’s death, by the filmmakers Valeria Sarmiento and Chamila Rodríguez, and that it was released in none other than the San Sebastian Film Festival.
socialist realism, he continues, “belongs to another time”, but “rebounds in ours”: “It functions as a critique of all the positions that are confronted today. It is a slightly comical, sarcastic film, about fixed positions regarding dialogue, both from the reactionary point of view and the revolutionary point of view. It allows us to think about the dilemma of our time: in my opinion, we are facing a great symbolic disorder in the political world, where words that used to mean something today mean something else.”
“Liberalism in the United States is not the same as liberalism in Argentina, for example. There is an ideological disorder. It seems to me that this film allows us to introduce a playful dimension to that disorder and to resume discussions of the past from a more intelligent, more didactic, and freer perspective of the present, in order to precisely undo the rigidity with which everything is discussed today,” he reflects.
Julián D’Angiolillo, with retrospective and closing film at Ficic
The Argentine Julián D’Angiolillo has a prominent role in the programming. Your movie The grotto continues It is the closing of the edition.
“D’Angiolillo’s cinema is a cinema that has a lot to do with the adventure of knowledge. The grotto continuesIn principle, it is a film about caving, about the science of caves, which is something very rarely seen. The interesting thing about the film is, first of all, the introduction to an unknown science, which also refers to an old experience or metaphor of Western tradition that says that knowledge begins precisely when you can leave the caves, according to the idea of Plato. There is an inversion here, knowledge is going to the caves, and what the film does is play with that. It also tells why there are speleologists, what they go to do in the caves, and everything is related both to the geological history of the Earth and also to the water reserves of the planet,” Koza develops.
Furthermore, this year’s retrospective is of this filmmaker, with the screening of three of his shorts and also the feature films Become a Fairy (2006) and Body of letter (2015).
The curator talks about Become a Fairy to continue explaining the importance of D’Angiolillo’s cinema: “It is from when it was still an incipient phenomenon, after 2001-2002 and the economy absolutely destroyed in Argentina, when the phenomena of parallel markets appear, not only of the dollar, but of other objects. This is a portrait about La Salada, at a time when no one was talking about La Salada. That’s what I like about D’Angiolillo’s cinema: it is a cinema that is associated with knowledge, and with knowledge located in specific spaces.”
To go to Ficic
From Thursday, May 2 to Sunday, May 5 in Cosquín. The complete schedule with days and times of the performances can be consulted on the website cosquinfilmfest.com (tickets can also be purchased there for $1,500).
