We are happy to announce a few special events that will take place before and during the upcoming conference in Buenos Aires.

/ Pre-Opening Screening + Dialogue between Michael Renov and Thomas Elsaesser

The Sun Island (Thomas Elsaesser, 2017)  – August 1, 8:00 PM – Auditorio de la Escuela Nacional de Cine y Experimentación Cinematográfica (INCAA-ENERC).

This is a film about coincidences, shattered lives and posthumous fame. It is about love and passion, friendship and heartbreak, about history with a capital H and lower-case histories, about Germany between the wars, about an island in Berlin, about environmental protection, sustainability and recycling – before these terms had been properly invented. It is about the dead that unexpectedly speak out among the living, about the reunion with a past whose existence hardly anyone suspected. And it is about the utopian potential of ideas buried in the ground of a tiny marshland island for the past 70 years.

The Sun Island is an essay film with voice-over narration, interviews and extracts from correspondences, told collectively but still in a mostly linear and chronological manner. Framed by a personal present-day perspective, it has a flashback construction. At a meta-level, it discusses and problematizes the status of home movies as visible evidence –unreliable and indispensable– but whose unreliability can take on documentary force and authentic presence.

 

Special Guest Panels

Book Presentation “The act of documenting. Documentary Film in the 21st Century” (Brian Winston, Gail Vanstone, Wang Chi)

Speakers: Brian Winston and Gail Vanstone.

 

“Lightning in the presence of danger: apparitions and resonances of the figure of Ernesto Guevara in the work of Leandro Katz”

Speakers: Eduardo Grüner, Leandro Katz, Ana Longoni, Jeffrey Skoller.

Coordination: María Aimaretti.

 

“Film-essay: the status of the field”

Speakers: Ignacio Agüero, Carmen Guarini, Jorge La Ferla, Susana Barriga.

Coordination: Carmen Guarini.

 

Conference Field Trip

Guided Visit to the Ex ESMA – Space of Memory and Human Rights (former secret center of torture, forced disappearance, detention, and execution during the last dictatorship)

http://www.espaciomemoria.ar/english.php

August 6th – (leaving in the morning)