Peter Tscherkassky, Joan Fontcuberta and Laura Huertas Millán, first names in Curtocircuíto 2019

[18.07.2019] The Santiago de Compostela International Film Festival announces today the first names in its 16th edition, which will be held between 28 September and 6 October. It is the Austrian filmmaker and theoretician Peter Tscherkassky, to whom a retrospective will be dedicated; the photographer and essayist Joan Fontcuberta is invited to present Carte Blanche and give a Master Class; and Franco-Colombian artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán will lead the Púlsar section. Curtocircuíto continues with its commitment to bring to Galicia great names alongside new names in filmmaking and the contemporary visual culture, in a program always committed to artistic quality, the latest film trends and an interdisciplinary approach. 

Dark light like the one we find in more than 25 films created by Peter Tscherkassky (Vienna, 1958), one of the great names in avant-garde cinema who, in addition to accumulating a broad and powerful filmography, has extensive essays on the history and theory of the cinema. In 1979 he began to make films in Super 8. In 1991 he founded the renowned Sixpackfilm (one of the distributing collaborators of Curtocircuíto) with Brigitta Burger-Utzer. He made some thirty films, among which are Trilogy of CinemaScope (1997-2001) – made up of the films L'arrivée, Outer Space and Dream Work–, Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005), Coming Attractions (2010) and The Exquisite Corpus (2015), which will be a part of the selection that will be screened in Curtocircuíto. He received about fifty awards, including the Golden Gate Award (San Francisco), the Grand Prix of the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and the award for the best short film at the Venice International Film Festival. 

With Tscherkassky, Curtocircuíto awards the opportunity to enjoy one of the most controversial, eloquent and transgressive filmographies of current cinema on the big screen. His technique of artisan work with celluloid challenges the traditional, shifting between the breakdown of language and the creation of a visual universe with a strong erotic and sexual jolt. 

Joan Fontcuberta (Joan Fontcuberta)

In this transgression of the conventional values of the image also dwells the photographer and essayist Joan  Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955) that Curtocircuíto will grant Carte Blanche. The Catalan has developed a plural activity in the world of photography as creator, teacher, critic, curator and historian. In a historical time in which images are one of the pillars of society, Joan Fontcuberta stands out as the key figure in the analysis of visual capitalism. His work as an essayist is illustrated in his photography, where he reflects on the creation of realities and not so much on the representation of it. Always looking for subversion and critical vision, Fontcuberta, who moves with ease in the field of fake, is one of the theorists behind the post-photography concept.

He is the author of a dozen publications, such as El beso de Judas. Fotografía y Verdad [The Judas Kiss. Photography and Truth] (1997), Ciencia y Fricción [Science and Friction] (1998), La cámara de Pandora [Pandora’s Camera] (2010) and La furia de las imágenes [The Fury of Images] (2016). His work was exhibited at the MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, at the  Maison Européenne de la Photographie de Paris and at the Science Museum in London. 

Aequador (Laura Huertas Millán, 2012)

Continuing with the subversion of reality, the Púlsar section, in which each edition showcases emerging filmmakers, will be dedicated this year to the work by Laura Huertas Millán (1983), a Franco-Colombian artist and filmmaker whose cinematographic practice starts with ethnography in order to lead to a kind of science fiction mixed with fantasy and fake documentary. She was an associate researcher at the Sensory Ethnography Lab (2014) and the Film Study Center (2014-2017), both at Harvard University. Between 2009 and 2012 she developed a series of pieces pivoting around exoticism linked to the great stories of conquerors and voyagers in the United States, among which are  Journey  to a Land Otherwise Unknown (2011) and Aequador (2012), filmed between European botanical gardens and the Colombian Amazon that combine fantasy, science fiction and false documentary to unearth colonial representations and dismantle their show of power. In 2012, she began a series on 'ethnographic fictions', where her films Black Sun (2016), La Libertad [Freedom] (2017), jeny303 (2018) and The  Labyrinth (2018) are set. Her pieces received awards at festivals such as FIDMarseille, Doclisboa, Frontera Film Festival, the Bogota International Documentary Film Festival ( MIDBO), Videobrasil and the Biennial of  Moving Images in Buenos Aires.

The films by this author corroborates the disappearance of the traditional borders between documentary and fiction. Using tools from the two domains, Huertas Millán builds stories that delve into our cultural roots and our way of understanding the world. The Púlsar section will review the complete work of this filmmaker, in one of the first spotlights that are done in Spain about her work.  

In its 16th edition, Curtocircuíto continues to delve into the breakdown of the classic format of cinematographic events by proposing interdisciplinary contents while maintaining quality cinema and the commitment to contemporary languages as the main axis. In addition to the film screenings, Curtocircuíto will also offer audiovisual shows, training sessions and various performances in different venues in the city.

The Santiago de Compostela International Film Festival, which will reveal more topics in its programming in the coming weeks, is organised by the Santiago City Council, and funded, among others, by the Provincial Council of A Coruña, the Galician Agency for Cultural Industries (AGADIC) and ICAA.