Increasingly Powerful Sinais
Quiasma, de Tono Mejuto
In this edition of 2017, (S8) reserves, as usual, a special section in the program for cinema made in Galicia and / or by Galician people. This year Sinais section embraces several focus: besides the already traditional selection of short films of Sinais in Curto, a special focus will be dedicated to the filmmaker and film editor Diana Toucedo, and Xisela Franco will present her video installation Interior, exterior, durante.
It is obvious that there are creative forces in Galicia. Forces that, moreover, decide to take daring paths, giving way to experimentation and research. This special disposition to place themselves on the side of nonconformism and to be guided by the formal search turns the selection of Sinais into a sample of stimulating variety, in which demand overcomes all localism.
Diana Toucedo
As we said, this year the section embraces three ways. Diana Toucedo is the author in focus of this edition. Filmmaker, film editor and teacher, Toucedo has been developing a work that involves a reflection on film image for years. On the one hand, in works such as Corpo preto and Ser de luz whose strategy is appropriation and edition (in accordance with the theme of this year’s edition), and on the other hand, filming and rethinking history from the domestic and ethnographic scope in works such as Homes and Por que non cantades todas, or approaching the personal aspect in works as Imágenes secretas. Now she is working on her next feature film, Trinta Lumes. As a film editor, she is responsible for works such as Isaki Lacuesta’s La noche que no acaba, the animated film Chico y Rita by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal with the film editor Arnau Quiles, and O quinto evanxeo de Gaspar Hauser by Alberto Gracia, who won the 2013 Fipresci Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival. As a teacher, she teaches at the Creative Documentary Master of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Toucedo will present several of her works in a special showing, in which she will also talk about her creative processes and projects under preparation.
Montañas ardientes que vomitan fuego, de Helena Girón y Samuel Delgado
Sinais en Curto opens several interesting paths. Jaione Camborda (also screenwriter) will present his Rapa das bestas, a particular vision about the ethnographic film and experimental non-fiction, in which he filmed this tradition through the closeness of super 8, using black and white, in a film that was at Bafici. The artist and photographer Carla Andrade delves into a slow and special vision of landscape, in this case the Atacama desert, with her work El paisaje está vacío y el vacío es paisaje. Fuerzas invisibles by the film editor Marcos Flórez is also about landscape, but from a personal and emotional scope, with an impressionist formal exploration on color reinforced by his own soundtrack. This time Xurxo Chirro attends with one of his work of appropriation, Bomb Movie, urgent comment on the recent bombing of the United States on Afghanistan. After the international success of Sin Dios Ni Santa María, Helena Girón and Samuel Delgado show Montañas ardientes que vomitan fuego, a film that starts from the volcanic tunnels of Tenerife to an underground story of resistance, which has already been at prestigious festivals like the one in Toronto, New York and Rotterdam. Quiasma, by Tono Mejuto, is a film that documents the creative process of the choreographer Javier Martín, with music by Oleg Karavaichuk (Oleg of Andrés Duque), with whom he collaborated while living: a study of movement and work with the body filmed in 16mm and in black and white. And as it is also a question of bringing to light new talents and attending to those who show promise, Sinais en Curto will also bring O ollo cobizoso, the work of the young students of fine arts Lara and Noa Castro, who, before the age of twenty, give a sharp look to their environment, with an edition full of correspondences, resonances and visual ingenuity.
As regards exhibitions, this year Sinais brings the proposal, as ambitious as exciting, of Xisela Franco. Her installation, Interior, exterior, durante (made for the MARCO of Vigo, and that this time we can see at the Foundation Luis Seoane during the festival) documents the views from her window in Baiona during a whole day in eight hours. A picture that involves a fascinating reflection on time, domestic space and landscape through its interaction with sound, which includes the first years of cognitive development and speech acquisition of her daughter from birth to three years. A work that is not only a reflection on the ideas of interior and exterior, time duration and passage of time, but also on motherhood and its relationship with creative processes. As precursor of Franco’s immersive installation, we can also see, as support and extension of this idea, her self-portrait Vía Láctea (2013), in which her own nude body breastfeeding his daughter serves as a projection screen to a 16mm film painted by herself.