UTOPIA. Keep on Moving Filme aus Lateinamerika und anderswo | Filme und Gespräche

In the organizer's words:

Based on five films from the years 1963 to 1993, film historian Luciano Castillo Rodríguez traces the political and aesthetic awakening as well as the social utopias of Latin American cinema. Following in the footsteps of Vittorio De Sica's Miracle of Milan (1951), directors Varda, Alea, Lilienthal, Sorín and Cabrera draw on the power of poetry and emotion to tell not only of the belief that the world can change, but also of its necessity.

The event takes place in cooperation with the Ibero-American Institute of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

Program on Saturday, 20.4.

3 p.m.
Introduction
The Miracle of Milan
Salut les Cubains (with introduction)

6.30 pm
A Cuban fight against demons (with introduction)
Followed by a discussion between Luciano Castillo Rodríguez and Jeanine Meerapfel

Program on Sunday, 21.4.

2 pm
Introduction
The uprising

4.30 pm
The King's movie (with introduction)

7 p.m.
The Strategy of the Snail (with introduction)
Followed by a discussion between Luciano Castillo Rodríguez and Jeanine Meerapfel

FILMED UTOPIA a contribution by Luciano Castillo Rodríguez

The Miracle of Milan / Miracolo a Milano
Italy 1951, 100 min, OV with English subtitles
Director: Vittorio De Sica
Cast and crew: Emma Gramatica, Francesco Golisano, Paolo Stoppa

The naive main hero Toto, a foundling raised by an elderly lady, comes to Milan as a young man to look for work and a place to live. He finds shelter in a shanty town on the outskirts of the city, which consists of little more than a few shacks. But Toto doesn't let himself be shaken, and with his exuberance he brings life to the dreariness. When oil is discovered on the site, the settlement is evacuated. But Toto's miracle pigeon is able to turn evil into good. Orders become arias and soldiers become pacifists. When the inhabitants literally rise up at the end, it is because only those who believe in miracles will experience miracles.

The film, based on a novella by author Cesare Zavattini, is inspired by the spirit of neorealism, the post-war wave that was primarily dedicated to depicting social reality. The film was shot in a semi-documentary style at authentic locations, with non-professionals chosen as characters and bringing their own experiences into play. Director Vittorio De Sica, however, goes one step further. He adds fairy-tale elements that counter the real-life setting with the power of imagination and human will. In this respect, de Sica's cinema is related to Latin American cinema, which is deeply rooted in the tradition of magical realism. A victory for the little people, David against Goliath. At the time, the film was accused of being quasi-religious and only wanting to offer consolation. On the contrary: the basic question is still valid: who owns the city?

Salut les Cubains
France / Cuba 1963, 30 min, OV with English subtitles
Director: Agnès Varda

Like many intellectuals of her time, filmmaker Agnès Varda sympathized with the Cuban revolution. The small Caribbean island state had liberated itself from American "casino capitalism" through its own efforts. In 1963, three years after the revolution, Agnès Varda went to Cuba to see for herself and returned to the editing table with over 1000 negatives. In a playful montage, she makes the photos dance to ChaChaCha music, shows everyday street scenes as well as marches, focuses on the women with their awakened self-confidence, documents the sugar cane harvest and Fidel Castro during an appearance. You can sense their enthusiasm, but also their subtle irony. Together with actor Michel Piccoli, she speaks the commentary, which rhythmically enhances the images.

Ein kubanischer Kampf gegen Dämonen (also under the title: Eine kubanische Schlacht gegen die Dämonen) / Una pelea cubana contra los demonios
Cuba 1972, 130 min, OV with English subtitles
Director:Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
Performers: José Antonio Rodríguez, Raúl Pomares, Silvano Rey, Mares González, Olivia Belizaire

Director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is one of the most important representatives of New Cuban Cinema. After studying law in Havana, where he met Fidel Castro, he went to Rome to study directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. One of his formative teachers was Cesare Zavattini, on whose novel The Miracle in Milan is based. He joined the resistance against the Batista dictatorship and from then on was one of the key players in the development of the new Cuban cinema. He brought his experience of Italian neo-realism to the numerous feature and documentary films he made. He was a co-founder of the film school at the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) in Havana. Although he placed his films at the service of the young republic, he retained a high degree of independence and credibility. One of his most important themes is the legitimization of the revolution, which he derives from the devastating conditions of the colonial era. The film Una pelea cubana contra los demonios is based on the book of the same name by Cuban writer Fernando Ortiz Fernández. It is set in the Remedios region in the 17th century: a priest wants to move the community from one place to another out of self-interest. The obscurantist crusade provokes death and destruction. In his film, Alea condenses the ominous alliance of religion, power and exploitation and uses violent and expressive images to stage a crusade that leads to exorcism and mysticism.

Der Aufstand / La insurrección
Germany 1980, 101 min, OV with German subtitles
Director: Peter Lilienthal
Screenplay: Peter Lilienthal, Antonio Skármeta
Cast and crew: Augustin Pereira, Carlos Carania, Maria Lourdes Centeno de Zelaya

Peter Lilienthal's feature film is set in Nicaragua at the time of the Sandinistas' struggle against the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. Filming began immediately six weeks after the victory of the revolution. Lilienthal is a master at combining fiction with documentary elements and thus bringing the events of the time very close together. The focus is on the popular uprising in Leon, which played a decisive role in the outcome of the revolt. He uses a family story to illustrate his fundamental questions about the relationship between violence and revolt. It is the son of a middle-class family who serves in the military, is then persuaded by his father to desert and finally joins the resistance. Lilienthal shot the film with the participation of the citizens, the former urban guerrillas and units of the liberation army. Michael Ballhaus was at the camera. The screenplay was written in collaboration with the Chilean author Antonio Skármeta, who, as a supporter of Allende, had to leave Chile after the coup.

The Film of the King / La Película del Rey
Argentina 1986, 104 min, OV with German subtitles
Director: Carlos Sorín
Actors: Ulises Dumont, Julio Chávez, Roxana Berco

In this convoluted film-within-a-film construction, Argentinian director Carlos Sorín combines the true story of the Frenchman Orélie Antoine, a (real) adventurer who proclaimed himself King of Araucania and Patagonia in Tierra del Fuego in 1860, with the (fictional) story of the filming of a director named Arturo, who tries to film this bizarre story and gets caught up in a maelstrom of difficulties. The producer backs out, there is a lack of money, the actors leave the set. Arturo devises ever more absurd tricks to save the project. He replaces the missing actors with mannequins and quickly takes on the lead role himself. The over-the-top mirror fencing develops into a ludicrous parable about filmmaking and the insanity of megalomania in surreal images.

The Strategy of the Snail / La Estrategia del Caracol
Italy / Colombia / France 1993, 116 min, OV with German subtitles
Director: Sergio Cabrera
Actors: Fausto Cabrera, Frank Ramírez

The comedy is set in an apartment building in the old town district of Bogotá. A speculator wants to clear the building. But the residents all have good reasons not to be evicted. But where no regular means can help, resistance and cunning are needed. This is how the colourful society comes together: the anarchist, who has learned his "trade" in earlier battles, the young revolutionary, who has only rehearsed the uprising so far, a lawyer, albeit without a license, a priest, who seeks his happiness in this world, as well as a transperson and a woman with her seriously ill husband. The film is a hymn to public spirit and solidarity with the clear message that it is worth fighting back.

FILMED UTOPIAS

No one has been able to define utopia more unerringly than the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: we will only achieve it "when we are able to live every day as if it were the first, and every night as if it were the last".

The moving image has been such a utopia of man since its beginnings, and possibly even before, until he finally succeeded in making the image work, capturing it with a camera and projecting it onto a white surface populated by trembling dreams. Since these beginnings, it has rained a lot, a practically never-ending rain, as if from a story by García Márquez, and cinema, now elevated to the status of the seventh art, still needs utopias - just like mankind.

These go back to a time when silence reigned in the auditoriums, interrupted only by a piano, a few musicians, sometimes booed by the audience, or even an entire orchestra. A Cuban poet, Fina García Marruz, succeeds in capturing the character of silent film in just two verses: "It doesn't lack sound, it has silence." The German filmmaker Fritz Lang, who belongs to that select group of people for whom the adjective "genius" is simply inadequate, still thrills and unsettles audiences with Metropolis; while the magic of Cesare Zavattini, the patriarch of Italian neorealism, allows Totò(il buono) to take off with others on a flight over a wondrous Milan.

What greater utopia could there be than a victorious revolution on a small Caribbean island, just 90 nautical miles away from an ever-threatening Goliath? Like other filmmakers - including Kurt Maetzig - Agnés Varda, who lives in Paris, cannot stand idly by and ends up in Havana with a camera in her luggage. She traveled the country from one end to the other with it, driven by the desire not to miss a single motif. How she manages to unearth this enormous visual treasure in the editing room is one of the great secrets of Salut les cubains.

Years later, when the new Cuban cinema was wowing audiences and winning prizes at the Leipzig Festival and international festivals, one of its most important representatives, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, went back to the 17th century to reflect on the turbulence of his own time. He does not hesitate to confront the demons that were to darken the cultural life of an entire period. The equally restless and astute director Peter Lilienthal, who passed away in April 2023, also had no choice but to take a stand on another struggle. He sees how the Sandinistas are on the verge of achieving a seemingly utopian liberation and sets off to Nicaragua to film the uprising of the masses.

In another corner of Latin America, a group of neighbors come together. They hole up in their house and - equipped with a very effective strategy - oppose the machinations of a real estate shark.

At the southern tip of the continent, in Argentina, a young cineaste marches towards the horizon with a sword in one hand and a movie camera in the other, determined to make his film at any cost.

The selection we have made for this film weekend at the Akademie am Hanseatenweg, with the risk that every selection is subject to, aims to approach this and many other chimeras. Carlos Sorín, at the time still a real newcomer to the genre of fictional feature films, puts a categorical sentence into the mouth of his protagonist that is representative of so many cineastes, not only but especially in New Latin American Cinema, the only truly continental movement in the history of cinema: "I will continue on this path until I die!"

Luciano Castillo Rodríguez

Price information:

One-way ticket € 6/4 Day ticket € 12/9