Fast Review-Fernando Guzzoni’s Blanquita hits the a viewer a with punch to the face. After viewing the Chilean Oscar entry on the country’s child sex traffic scandal I needed a moment. The Venice Film Festival winner is now playing in New York City and Los Angeles. 4 maybe 4.5 stars out of 5.
Running Time 98 minutes, An Outsider Pictures release.
An interview with film directors Flavia Mastrella and Antonio Rezza from the Venice Film Festival.
1.This is your sixth feature film in a 30-year career that has encompassed Television, shorts and medium-length films. How difficult is it nowadays to get a film financed?
Flavia: “Escoriandoli” (our first movie) was the only film we shot with a producer. It was an interesting experience but we soon realised it was impossible to replicate it. The production pressures had too much impact on our artistic choices. We produce our films and use independent distribution channels.
Antonio: For us, getting a budget is never the main issue. We can always sort something out. A budget is useful because it offers warranties to the film. Without that guarantee, we can’t start shooting. So we look for funders.
2. Where did the idea for the story and the script of “SAMP” come from?
Flavia: The inspiration came from the ancestral landscape of Puglia. I was deeply involved in the stories from “La terra del rimorso” (The Land of Remorse), written by Ernesto De Martino.
Antonio: Flavia made a location scouting in the Triana Valley in the spring of 2001. The idea was born there. The screenplay is the result of a cycle of abandonment and reconnection with an on-again, off-again 20 year-long work.
3. What should audiences infer from this film and take away from it?
Flavia: Our films are open to interpretation. We do not offer a truth. We just gather some thoughts. I would like the audience to grasp that sense of expressive liberty we encourage.
Antonio: The great sense of freedom and lack of interest in all forms of power.
4. What are your feelings of having the film play at the Venice Festival this year?
Flavia: We are happy. We can finally see if our communicative experiment works, see the reactions of an audience. We continue to seek new methods to surprise ourselves and others. I enjoy the risk.
Antonio: I was moved by the great acclaim that welcomed the film. It’s nice to feel emotions. It is very childish to vibrate to the sound of approval. But it is the only thing that keeps us attached to the world.
5. Do you feel a little cheated by the Covid-19 crisis with less people attending the festival?
Flavia: For us it is completely normal to be selected in times of crisis, it is our bizarre destiny.
SAMP screened in Competition at the 2020 Venice Film Festival.
Production Company: Rezzamastrella
Running Time: 78 Minutes
Country: Italy
Steve Yates contributes to Black and Paper.
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One intriguing entry into the Venice competition program this year is Lahi, Hayop (Genus, Pan) by Lavrente Indico Diaz (better known as Lav Diaz). Those already familiar with the work of the Filipino director will know he is synonymous with slow contemplative cinema. His earlier films Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004) is ten hours long, one of the longest cinematic narrative films of all time. While some of his more recent prize-winning films, A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (2016), feature high on the longest ever films list. The director, a former film critic, drew from influences of work by the proponents of art cinema as Michangelo Antonioni and Robert Bresson.
Lav Diaz is also no stranger to the Venice Film Festival. His 2016 filmThe Woman Who Left won the Golden Lion. Lahi, Hayop, for the director comparatively modest in length at just over two and a half hours, still contains his trademark allegories of human greed and brutality, shot in monochrome with long takes. Dismayed by the working conditions at a gold mine, three workers journey to their home village on foot through the isolated wilderness of the mythical island Hugaw.
The weariness creates a hallucinatory effect for the three main protagonists; two mature men and a younger more capricious colleague. From here, with money, envy, and narcissism as the central themes, their relationship and events become more unpredictable and dramatic. As the recent back story unfolds, with scenes of contemporary Filipino society set against notions of the long-term effects of Japanese and American occupation.
Drawing allusions to the formal elements of Bertholt Brecht in its steady rhythm. Lahi, Hayop consistently uses the static camera, and almost always films at the same distance. With virtually no reference to the present, the film could be set at any time in the last 50 years. Given weight by the fact, when speaking of the film, the director’s inspiration came from a question asking him to define the human species. His urgent reply: “Despite being the better developed species, most of us still retain the demeanor and comportment of the chimpanzee or the genus Pan”. Transposed to capitalist society, the film depicts the destructive effects of the human animal, not least through greed. However, the director also finds optimism because the human brain contintues to develop. Diaz believes we will eventually become a self-actualized species, following the examples of Buddha or Gandhi.
Lahi, Hayop has been playing in the final three days of the Venice program. It was in contention for the Main Competition (Orizzonti) prize.
~ Steven Yates contributes to Black and Paper
Along with the more high-profile feature films, we should not overlook the short film entries in Venice. I commend those that have been selected. The short film competition in Venice has programmed a total of twelve entries this year. The selection represents all regions of the world except South America.
Two further films selected are screening out of competition. One, an intriguing piece titled Si by Italian director Luca Ferri. Running at just under 20 minutes, it has a split screen effect; the left side for the visuals, the right for text. In his notes, the director talks of Si as the first of five planned films representing absence. Here, a man studies a series of encyclopedic images from the Prelinger Archives, illustrating the creation of the cosmos.
Humanity is conspicuously absent, represented only in its works and ruins. The man falls asleep and sinks into a nightmare of arctic hunters killing polar bears, while the compellingly melancholic soundtrack features two pieces of contemporary music by the composer Agazzi with the text linked to the director’s personal childhood memory of a suicide. Hope and redemption are also tellingly absent in this unique and pessimistic appraisal of the contemporary human condition.
The sole entry from the United Kingdom, a Scottish film called The Shift, directed by Laura Carreira. It is a candid snapshot of contemporary social dependency in an ever increasing insecure world of employment. A young woman called Anna takes her dog for a walk in the woods, then goes to the local supermarket. Waiting at the checkout, she gets a phone call telling her she has lost her shift as a temporary worker.
The director stated that he felt the need to represent this common but largely unaddressed social situation. The film conveys this poignant vulnerability as representation of an increasing amount of people. Shift, represents the temporary shift work and also the poignant shift in personal situation and security, as a powerless young woman sees her life change spontaneously and inexorably.
~ Steven Yates loves cinema. He is a frequent contributor to Black and Paper
Imagine Frank Zappa (who was no stranger to acting, or the absurd) in his prime starring in a debut film like Peter Jackson’s Braindead(1992) combined with Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi(1992). Chuck in elements from the anarchy of El Topo(1970) by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Alex Cox’s Repo Man(1984), but with an original take on everything. This pretty much sums up what is taking place here in SAMP, a high octane, no-rules feature by Flavia Mastrella and Antonio Rezza. However, although it is the case with the other aforementioned directors, this is not their debut film. In fact they have been making films for nearly thirty years. This is their sixth feature film, alongside various television programs and countless short and medium-length films.
The basic and immediate plot of a man called Samp, who, in the midst of wild dancing somewhere in old Puglia, leaves the ceremonial proceedings to inexplicably and insanely kill his mother, before ranting about her superficiality and how she somehow had failed him. After this, he visits some powerful crime boss who commissions him to start doing the same to ordinary people. The objective is the suppression of tradition and human feelings.
Without any moral justification, Samp starts taking down men, women and even children indiscriminately. Along the way, he gets paid by a pedestrian guarantor, meets poetic figures, seemingly normal people and a musician with whom he seems to form a genuine friendship. More than this, he even falls for various problematic women further causing him loose sense of reality.
The director’s explaination of SAMP, a film with the pace of a journey, the dynamics of a performance, mixing traditional archaic Puglia with a modern world inflicted by violence due to economic power. SAMPis therefore a metaphor of cultural disintegration without perspective, something they claim we have always experienced. Worth noting: SAMP took nineteen years to make and the characters age together with the authors.
The stark color images of the film enliven the action. There seems to be more bullets fired here than even John Woo’s Hard Boiled(1992). The frantic pace barely slows down, only when Samp briefly pauses to monologue, justify his actions or falls in love again. The insanity of what takes place, projected in such an anarchic way. I could compare to Luis Bunuel at his most extreme. SAMP is a road movie on foot that shatters the script, captures the locations, and takes no prisoners.
SAMP is screening at Venice Film Festival in the Venice Days section. The film is out of competition in the Special Events side bar.
Steven Yates is a cinephile. He regularly contributes to Black and Paper.