The 16th Bueu International Film Festival pays tribute to Joris Ivens with both a retrospective of his short films and a splendid monograph on Ivens, written by Severiano Casalderrey. This book will be presented on Sunday 17th of Sepyember, it is the very first monograph on Ivens in the Galician language: La Expansion del documental a través de los cortometrajes de Joris Ivens (1898-1989).
'He was a restless person, always on the move'.
The long list of countries in which the filmmaker Joris Ivens (Nijmegen, Netherlands, 1898-Paris, 1989) filmed exceeds twenty, in the five continents, and supports the words of Severiano Casalderrey, programmer of FICBUEU. This year, the Bueu International Film Festival dedicates its «Retrospective Section» to this Dutch filmmaker, one of the greatest documentary filmmakers of all time: a legend of a film format usually excluded from cinemas and distribution circuits.
Four of the most representative shorts from Joris Ivens’ extensive filmography will be screened on Sunday evening (06.00 p.m.) at the auditorium of the Centro Social do Mar in Bueu. Tickets are available at de FICBUEU online shop. They can also be purchased at the ticket office of the Centro Social do Mar from one hour before the screenings.
FICBUEU notebook
But before that, tomorrow Saturday (11.30 a.m.), Severiano Casalderrey will also present at the Festival a monograph on the Dutch director, written by him and entitled The Expansion of Documentary Film through the Short Films of Joris Ivens (1898-1989). This will be the fourth of the FICBUEU Notebooks –after those dedicated to the Nouvelle Vague, the National Film Board of Canada (the largest public production company in the world) and the Official Cinematography School (the first film studies centre in Spain)–, with which the event seeks to remember and highlight both works and filmmakers who played an important role in the history of cinema. The publication will serve to bring the public closer to the figure of Ivens, who was a direct witness with his camera to the most important social changes, crises, wars and revolutions of the 20th century.
The monograph on Ivens produced by FICBUEU is supported by the Secretaría Xeral de Política Lingüística, which has been collaborating with this initiative since its first edition.
Poetic and also committed look
The Dutch director made more than fifty films in his six-decade career, from his first short, the western The Burning Arrow, which he made with the help of his father when he was only 13 years old, to his last, A Windy Story, about China, which he shot just a year before his death.
Notebook and films go hand in hand at FICBUEU with the aim of highlighting four key facets of this director. As a poetic filmmaker, influenced by the artistic avant-gardes of the beginning of the century, he will show his work with the short film Regen (Rain), an abstract exploration of the effects of rain in a city like Amsterdam. His activist side (social awareness was, in fact, the permanent driving force of his work until the end of his life: a few days before his death he took part in Paris, at the age of 91, in a massive protest against the massacres in Tiananmen Square) will be reflected in Borinage, a film about the Belgian miners’ strikes.
His adventurous spirit will be represented in the third film included in the screening, Indonesia Calling, in which Ivens showed his support for the independence movement when the Asian country was still a Dutch colony. And finally, we will get to know his facet as a war chronicler, as he filmed almost all of them: the Spanish Civil War (with a short film made with Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles), the Second World War, the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnam War, the setting for Le ciel, la terre (Heaven, Earth), which closes the Festival’s retrospective screening. «His films are a portrait of the last century around the world», sums up Casalderrey.
