Today, filmmakers are delving into their own lives to achieve universality.
Carla Simón kicks off our overview with Romería (4 pm – Cinémathèque @Théâtre des Capucins): a young woman sets out to find the Galician family of her father, who died of AIDS, guided by her mother’s diary. The scene changes with Mad Bills to Pay (6:15 pm – Cinémathèque @Théâtre des Capucins) by Joel Alfonso Vargas. A love letter to Dominican culture in the Bronx, somewhere between Cassavetes and documentary truth, shot in 16 days with actors cast on the street.
Another family portrait: Endless Cookie (8:15 pm – Ciné Utopia) follows nine years of conversations between two Canadian half-brothers between Toronto and the isolated Manitoba reserve. An anti-colonialist pamphlet, all rendered in cartoon-style animation.
Ira Sachs’ masterstroke, Peter Hujar’s Day (8:30 pm – Ciné Utopia) stars Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in a New York apartment in 1974. A prodigious, word-for-word reconstruction of a recorded conversation between queer photographer Peter Hujar and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz.
