This Wednesday marks the start of this year’s BAFICI, ten straight days of screenings of films from all around the world. Whether you are looking for sexploitation, serious documentaries, classic pictures of yesteryear, or top picks from the indie film circuit, this year’s BAFICI has it all, with a selection of more than 400 features and shorts.

(Photo courtesy of BAFICI Festival)

The festival kicks off with ‘The Congress’, directed by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman. For the second consecutive year, the opening film — previously relegated to an exclusive event for BAFICI dignitaries — will be shown at the Parque Centenario amphitheatre in a free outdoor event on Wednesday 2nd April (8pm). The decision on this more inclusive beginning to the festival belongs to Marcelo Panozzo, who is back for his second year as BAFICI’s artistic director.

If your Spanish leaves a lot to be desired, BAFICI is the perfect place to become acquainted with Argentine cinema, since all of the Spanish language films are subtitled in English. There are more local titles than ever this year, with three Argentine films making it into the International Competition (‘Algunas Chicas’ by Santiago Palavecino, ‘La Salada’ by Juan Martín Hsu and ‘Mauro’ by Hernán Rosselli). There is also an exciting lineup in the Argentine Competition, with plenty of anticipation around films like ‘Historia del Miedo’ (Benjamín Naishtat), ‘Ciencias Naturales’ (Matías Lucches), and ‘El Escarabajo de Oro’ (Alejo Moguillansky). Oh, and don’t miss a chance to see some classics from the golden age of Argentine filmmaking in the retrospective of comedic director Carlos Schlieper.

Besides the Argentine and International Competition, there’s the Avant-Garde and Genre section, which always promises some wild things you never would have imagined on the big screen. This year’s offering includes ‘G/R/E/A/S/E’ by Antoni Pinent, a deconstruction/collage/appropriation of the seventies musical film with John Travolta and Olivia Newton John. Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes is back to premier his short film ‘Redemption’, after his feature film ‘Taboo’ was one of the most commented of the 2012 edition of the festival. Another strange film in this section is a half-documentary, half-fictional account of people coming and going to a temple in Nepal, Manakamana, which is also the name of this film by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez.

Israel is the guest country at this year’s edition, with an a wide variety of films from the country as well as a retrospective on Uri Zohar, a prolific director who made nearly a dozen films critical of the history of the Zionist nation, including ‘The True Story of Palestine’ (1962) and ‘Every Bastard is a King’ (1968). Other directors treated to a retrospective this year include Rita Azevedo Gomes (Portugal), Jean-Stéphane Bron (Switzerland), Robert Fenz (United States), Cao Guimarães (Brazil), and B-movie master Frank Henenlotter (United States).

‘La Salada’ by Juan Martín Hsu is one of three Argentine films in the International Competition (photo courtesy of BAFICI)

In a year of two major international sporting events (the Winter Olympics and the World Cup), BAFICI has added a Sportivo section with a well-selected list of films about sports. It includes pictures like the Hungarian war drama ‘Two Half Times in Hell’ (Zontán Fábri) where Nazi soldiers take on Hungarian servicemen on the soccer field, and a classic Argentine film about soccer talents, ‘El Crack’ (José Martínez Suárez). ‘Head Games’ (Steve James), another film in this section, documents a topic that has become particularly pressing in terms of American football, but also other sports as well: the long term effects of repeated head injuries. James’s earlier sports documentary, ‘Hoop Dreams’, is also included in the Sportivo section.

The number of film premiers at this year’s festival is also noteworthy, with directors like Júlio Bressane, Raya Martin, Kelly Reichardt, Alan Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Ti West, and Takashi Miike all showing their new films at the 16th BAFICI. For the youngest BAFICI goers (or the youngest at heart), there is a pre-debut of two much-awaited sequels, ‘Muppets Most Wanted’ (James Bobin) and ‘Rio 2′ (Carlos Saldanha) and the usual list of animated films from across the globe, not to mention a special section, Retro UPA, dedicated to classic cartoon films by the United Productions of America.

All in all, no matter what tickles your moviegoer’s fancy, there is bound to be a film or two for you at this year’s BAFICI. As always, tickets for the hottest films often sell out, so buy in advance online on the official BAFICI website, or in person starting 3rd April at any of the BAFICI locations: Village Recoleta, Village Caballito, Centro Cultural San Martín, Malba Cine, Planetario, Fundación Proa and Arte Multiplex Belgrano (the free outdoor BAFICI screenings will take place at the amphitheatre at Parque Centenario, but tickets are not on sale there). Finally, if you have a valid student ID, you can get into the free press showings (provided the theatre doesn’t fill up with journalists, which it rarely does); pick up a schedule at the BAFICI press room at the Centro Cultural Recoleta.

Check back with The Indy for film reviews during the festival and happy viewing!

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What is a woman? What does it mean to be a mother? A daughter? A wife? These aren’t easy questions to answer, but they are the issues ‘Cuarto Oscuro’ want to get us thinking and more importantly, talking about, with their new film.

‘Entrevistas Feminismo’ is a new documentary project aiming to re-ignite the conversation about gender roles in Argentine society. This is no bra burning monologue, it is an important and crucially inclusive look at a topic which should be on everyone’s lips – men included!

The film takes the form of four interviews and is shot through with snippets of vintage film and playful graphics. From the deadpan humour of a middle-aged man to the viewpoint of a self assured career woman, ‘Entrevistas Feminismo’ introduces the undeniably thorny issue of gender relations in a way that is at once enlightening and moving.

The film traces each interviewee as their perspectives change. It shows that we are all affected by our social backgrounds, personal histories and locations and leaves open the potential for finding similarities between each other rather than focusing on our differences.

The film will be launched at the end of July and the group are looking for funding to start a web platform. The website is key to the reflexive and inclusive attitude of the project.

As well as giving viewers the chance to watch the film for free, the website will act as a forum for the free exchange of ideas. Through it, related groups can meet and collaborate, stimulating democratic debate around the issues of feminism, gender imbalance and human rights.

Director Nuria Becu knows that today, political and social activism is as much about online as on the ground. She founded ‘Cuarto Oscuro’ as a way of engaging and encouraging political activism across disciplines and groups in society. This project was motivated by Becu’s desire to support groups working for gender equality in Argentina and fits with Cuarto Oscuro’s original vision of boosting the potential of political activism in society.

Becu herself is no stranger to political activism, having worked in the field of human rights for many years. Now she wants to highlight the debate on feminism and human rights, using this documentary as the starting point.

The project hopes to raise $17,290 and has 34 days remaining. For more information, click here.

Prior to an epiphany in 2003, Korean/Brazilian film director Iara Lee had been immersed in the study of adapting the human limits of experience through technology. ‘Synthetic Pleasures’ (1995) panned across the subjects of virtual reality, biotechnology, plastic surgery, and designer drugs, previewing the facets of a transhuman future. “We amuse ourselves to death,” Lee quipped in a 1996 interview with Ruse Magazine.

An adoptive US-citizen and spouse of pro sports entrepreneur George Gund III, Lee was less amused by 2003. Observing the US invasion of Iraq with horror and concern over a future of self-destruction, she embarked on a documentary journey spanning five continents and answering those critics who questioned her political engagement as a filmmaker.

‘Cultures of Resistance’ (2010) – the product of Lee’s journey – is above all a testament to the power of cultural expression as a form of political activism. From the Amazon Basin to Nigeria, the Congo, Burma, Iran, and Palestine, among other locales, citizens and featured artists discuss the complexities of peace, violence, art, and resistance in pursuit of social justice.

Central to Lee’s depiction of global conflicts is the tension between waging violent and peaceful campaigns of resistance. After a barrage of themes imposed over a roving aerial map – “Imperialism”, “Oppressed Becomes Oppressor”, “Nonviolence”, “Art” – the film begins with footage from around the world on International Peace Day.

Following a disparate timeline of events that span roughly from the end of the 1980s to the present day, ‘Cultures of Resistance’ explores, side by side, the despairing mentality of resistance and hope. From the execution of Nigerian pacifist Ken Saro Wiwa in 1995, to the terror of repeated rape victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the fatal logic of violent mobilisation receives necessary if disheartening scrutiny, crucial to Lee’s candid portrayal of social struggle.

In the Amazon basin, chaos ensues over the Xingu dam project as an audience of sword-wielding indigenous residents ambush a representative of the project. Former child soldiers in Liberia provide chilling testimony of their abandoned life of drugs and violence. In the favelas of Rio, wanton attacks by both police and gangs prompt one artist to call the situation an “epidemic of minor conflicts everywhere”.

“Your mind must look at the darkness, but your will and action must be driven toward change,” says an Iranian activist.

The true alternative to violence, the film suggests, is resistance through art forms committed to activism. Musicians, editorial cartoonists, graffiti artists, poets, and dancers exhibit the ways in which cultural resistance facilitates education, unity, renewed identity, and the possibility of nonviolent reconciliation.

Some of the most alarming images in the film revolve around displaced children and their exposure to habitual violence. Many of the individuals interviewed lament and warn that the poverty and instability in these children’s lives will perpetuate cycles of violence in the absence of just reforms.

As in many documentaries that examine child poverty, the footage of wide-eyed kids staring into the camera lens highlights not only the gross inequality of electronics constructed from expropriated minerals, but the inadequacies of portraying daily life as these communities understand and live it. The range of locations and struggles considered in ‘Cultures of Resistance’ is so manifold that each and every instance, in its own right, could warrant several documentaries apiece.

To analyse this film strictly on the basis of the material presented would be inexcusably naïve, however, and too often ‘Cultures of Resistance’ contradicts its own criticism of the Western media’s suppression of facts.

It is beyond necessary for these underrepresented viewpoints to be heard and dignified with meaningful, committed dialogue, but the film seeks blamelessly to present a panoramic vision of a world in dire need, meanwhile condemning the left’s usual suspects of oppression to the status of monoliths.

The effect, unfortunate and short-sighted, is that deeply complicated and crucially different struggles, while informative in relative isolation, are minimised by an unspoken conviction: the superpowers of the world (“The United States and global public opinion” the film wryly jokes) will be locked in eternal antagonism.

It is no secret that Iara Lee was a proud participant in the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla, a humanitarian mission protesting the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza. Lee was a passenger on board the Turkish MV Mavi Marmara, the only one of six vessels to clash violently with the blockading Israeli Defence Forces. In international waters, nine activists were killed and seven Israeli soldiers injured in a clear mismatch of defence capabilities.

The United Nations Human Rights Council later produced a report detailing the circumstances of the confrontation, calling Israel’s conduct a violation of human rights but also casting doubt on organisations involved in the Flotilla. More significantly for global public opinion, Lee managed to withhold some footage of the incident despite Israeli forces confiscating nearly all traces of what happened.

While Israel got a lead on international media coverage of the event, Lee’s below deck footage went severely underreported in mainstream sources until long after, giving credence to accusations of a Western stranglehold in the global public relations war.

The incident in Gaza bears significance to ‘Cultures of Resistance’ because it underscores the critical role and responsibility of the media in bringing conflicts around the world to the attention of populations everywhere.

While Lee’s film courageously empowers voices buried beneath the prevailing slant, it does too little in the way of engaging precisely those audiences it deems sources of the problem. The segment on Palestine – at times a damning and disturbing indictment of Israeli practice (deemed an apartheid regime) – lacks the kind of full contextualisation that would better serve the peace process than inflaming an intransigent neoconservative reaction. ‘Cultures of Resistance’ risks such audiences watching without seeing.

Perhaps this is part of the calculus of making a film that will encourage social and political activism. “Your anger is a gift,” Rage Against the Machine’s Zach de la Rocha often said. Rooted in the left’s countercultural tradition, it is little surprise that Lee skilfully bridges art and politics – just like the protagonists of her film and members of the Cultures of Resistance Network who do, undoubtedly, effect positive change in communities around the world.

There is a certain kind of synthetic pleasure in depicting a political aesthetic of resistance, one that assimilates righteousness, technology, and the human heart in the service of awakening cultural identity.

The question is whether ‘Cultures of Resistance’, with its global aspirations for justice and peace, stirs up viewers’ unflinching conviction at the expense of critical examination. To bring true understanding of one’s adversaries, as well as the divides separating us’s from them’s to begin with, would seem a more arduous and insecure road. But it would make us all rely less on cynicism for inspiration. Art will survive.