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All About the Feathers had its world premiere in the Discovery sidebar at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival where Diana Sanchez characterized the film as "a bromance between a man and his rooster." She added: "Villalobos cultivates a dry comic style reminiscent of early Jim Jarmusch: cockeyed, minimalist, and affectionately attentive to behavioral quirks—both human and avian." The film followed up with its U.S. premiere last month at the Miami International, which awarded Villalobos its Encuentros Award the previous year, enabling the film to achieve completion. At Cultist, Hans Morgenstern praised the film's deadpan humor, warm wit, and resemblances to the films of Wes Anderson "without being too cute about it." He writes: "First-time director Neto Villalobos, who also wrote and edited the film, shows a keen eye for timing throughout the film, which runs a neat 85 minutes. He lets the camera linger on many scenes, building on a rhythm that seems to celebrate a love for the gradually unfolding moment and the Sisyphean myth of persistence. His original style never feels slow or dull, as it allows for the layers of ironic behavior to pile up for genuine laughs, well-earned by the charms of these characters." Univers/Ciné conducted a video interview in Spanish (with French subtitles) wherein Villalobos outlines the film's development over a persistent seven years. Another Spanish video interview can be found at LatAm Cinema.
The film premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival, where it won two Junior Jury Awards and was a nominee for the Golden Leopard. It had its North American premiere in the Discovery sidebar at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, where programmer Diana Sanchez noted: "Some families we're born into; some we build. And some families simply come to us, unannounced, when we least expect it. The story of The Amazing Catfish falls into that last category." Amazing Catfish went on to win Toronto's FIPRESCI Discovery Prize. Eric Ortiz Garcia interviewed Claudia Sainte-Luce for Twitch at the 2013 Morelia International. He determined that the film's title came from the fact that catfish live together in families, which Sainte-Luce likened to the family in her film. "I think every member of the family is amazing," she told Garcia, "and their force is staying together."
Winner of the Golden Seashell and the Sebastiane Award at the San Sebastián International Film Festival; Best Director and Screenplay at the Mar del Plata Film Festival; the Bronze Alexander and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Thessaloniki Film Festival; a Special Jury Prize at the Havana Film Festival; and awards for Best Female Performance by Samantha Castillo at the Montréal Festival of New Cinema and the Torino International Festival of Young Cinema, Bad Hair has likewise garnered unanimous critical acclaim. At the Toronto International, Diana Sanchez writes: "The slippery nature of identity—how it forms in us, the ways it tells us how we might want to look or who we desire—is at the heart of this third feature from Venezuelan writer-director Marina Rondón." At Variety, Jay Weissberg proclaims that "Mariana Rondón's impressively multilayered drama brings a powerful specificity to the story of a boy and his embittered single mother." Weissberg furthers: "Though Rondón had a script, she never showed it to the cast, preferring to work with them through improvisation. The results are a testament to the skills of all concerned, and performances are uniformly strong." At The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney concurs with the film's strength as "a spare neorealist drama that holds attention and emotional involvement with its deft balance of toughness and sensitivity." He contextualizes: "In loose scenes drawn out of improvisation work with the naturalistic actors, the standoff between mother and son is etched with unflinching honesty. Rondón's detached observational approach and parsimoniousness with plot details may be frustrating for audiences wanting conventional storytelling. But a complex, compassionate picture emerges of the external forces that can cloud a mother's love, and of the lengths of abnegation to which a child will go to secure a parent's affection." At IndieWire, Vanessa Martinez finds Bad Hair "a bold, gripping drama." At Twitch, Pedro Ponte observes: "Caracas becomes a character in itself, a violent, hostile character, with its largely crowded, prison-like apartment blocks where families live cramped and hopeless."
Winner of the Silver Seashell for Best Director at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, Fernando Eimbcke proved as charming (and funny!) as his films when we met last Fall at the Morelia International Film Festival where Club Sándwich played to his enthusiastic fanbase. At Variety, Rob Nelson extols Club Sándwich as the "essence of evocative simplicity" and "a minimalist film with maximum pathos." At The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney's bottom line is that Club Sándwich is "an intimate snapshot of separation anxiety" and concludes: "This is a modestly scaled film, but a refreshing one, laced with unforced humor. Eimbcke's observational style is dry and detached yet perceptive, channeled through the limpid gaze of Maria Secco's fixed camera. The Hockney-esque composed shots of the hotel swimming pool are used with particular effectiveness, and the lethargic rhythms of Mariana Rodriguez's editing are essential to the movie's general restraint. There's not a false note in the performances, from the internalized work of the two young leads to the more expressive countenance of [Maria Renee] Prudencio's Paloma, herself not so far removed from adolescence in her tender vulnerability." The Film Experience interviews Dánae Reynaud. At Keyframe Daily, David Hudson rounds up the reviews from the film's New York Film Festival screening.
At Nonfics, Daniel Walber describes Coast of Death as "a starkly beautiful documentary about nature's troubled relationship with mankind, set on the rough coast of Northeastern Spain. Director Lois Patiño transcends the typical fare of this genre with an inspired device that splits the audience's perspective between the landscape and its people." Walber observes that the "governing style of the film, present[s] the inhabitants of Galicia as tiny figures surrounded by the towering beauty of their environment" but that Patiño allows the audience to hear what these Galicians are saying, no matter how distant. "With this device," Walber concludes, "Patiño can play with the relationship between Galicia and the Galicians. …The people are in the landscape and the landscape is in the people, and Costa da Morte is a beautifully crafted exploration of this simultaneity. And while it enmeshes itself in the particular topography of Galicia, it's hard to imagine a place that wouldn't have some relationship with this same natural dialog."
At Sound on Sight, Christopher Clemente has a more guarded perspective: "Characterized by the titled location, Costa Da Morte is an amorous tale like no other. A love affair between its maker, Lois Patiño, and its coastal surroundings, the film is a small, intimate display of compassion between cinematographer and landscape. Capturing beauty and immortalizing natural liveliness is indeed accomplished with great triumph by the young director, but unfortunately for the masses, that same director might be the film's biggest and possibly only fan." Also: "Yet this is so much more than a nature documentary; the film stimulates the senses. Close your eyes and you are transported to Galica, which isn't the worst of places to spend 80 minutes, but may feel like 70 minutes too long. Because the film doesn't use a structured script and character development, aside from the embodiment of the coast itself, the journey can seem a little too prolonged and a bit too personalized from the filmmaker's point of view." At The Film Experience, Glenn Dunks more fairly negotiates spectatorial expectation by accepting Coast of Death on its own terms: "Costa da Morte is the type of film I would expect more from the people that brought us Sweetgrass and Leviathan. Patiño’s film may have found itself under the banner of 'avant-garde' thanks to its lack of traditional documentary elements such as talking heads and overriding narrative, but it's far more standard than the term 'avant-garde' would suggest. It's a nature documentary first and foremost; an anthropological study into the way people integrate. For some I guess that's weird and strange, but for me it's just life."
History of Fear had its premiere in the competition section of the 64th Berlin International Film Festival. At Variety, Peter Debruge notes that in Naishtat's hands, "the subtext intimidates even as what's happening on the surface sometimes seems inscrutable, the helmer aiming not to confuse so much as to allow audiences to project their own interpretations." The bottom line for Boyd von Hoeij at The Hollywood Reporter is that History of Fear is "an impressive debut feature that relies on visuals and the power of suggestion to talk about abstract notions such as angst." At IndieWire, Eric Kohn writes: "Buenos Aires is a haven for paranoia and confusion in Argentinian writer-director Benjamín Naishtat's mesmerizing debut History of Fear, though its title is something of a misnomer. Rather than chronicling the timeline of the listless quality that characterizes Argentina's suburban class—and, by extension, those around the world—History of Fear hypnotically sets its gaze on the present. Borrowing the beats of a disaster movie without ever giving the invisible threat a name, Naishtat explores the tenuous constructs that allow a subset of the population to deny the harsher ingredients of the world beyond their safety zone—until it's thrust right in front of them."
Manos Sucias, Josef Wladyka, USA / Colombia (2014)—A reluctant smuggler and his eager neophyte brother shepherd a dangerous narco-torpedo up the coast of Colombia, posing as fishermen. Paramilitary, guerrillas and hardscrabble desperation suffuse every inch of the jungle and waters that surround them, eager to separate the siblings from their only opportunity to escape the circumstances of their lives. Manos Sucias is the recipient of two 2013 San Francisco Film Society KRF Filmmaking grants. Director and co-writer Josef Kubota Wladyka, co-writer Alan Blanco, and producers Elena Julia Greenlee and Márcia Nunes are expected to attend the festival. IMDb.
Jonathan Holland's bottom line at The Hollywood Reporter is that The Militant is a "deceptively rambling, serious-minded coming-of-age drama with a sharp political point, built around a central performance that fascinatingly combines blankness and intensity." Comparing Nieto's effort with Santiago Mitre's El Estudiante, in its focus on "the political disenchantment of a disenfranchised generation", Holland synopsizes: "It's a comic, fish-out-of-water setup that generates some broad verbal and visual comedy, but far more urgent themes are bubbling under the surface, themes relating to a generation that has lost its way under the burden of a bad political and economic inheritance, consisting of people who are playing the roles of political activists without quite knowing what it is that political activists do."
At The Hollywood Reporter, Jonathan Holland observes that one of the film's most unique accomplishments is "its directorial U-turn from comedy to tightly focused, character-based drama for both Argentinian director Juan Taratuto and star Diego Peretti." He continues: "Particularly strong in its atmospherics and performances, especially from Peretti, who reveals previously unsuspected depths, this miniature tale of a damaged heart is admirable."
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