Punto de Vista will pay tribute to the work of Jonathan Schwartz with a retrospective and publication

What will be the first book about the American filmmaker will feature unpublished texts written by Erika Balsom, Max Goldberg, Michael Sicinski, Rebekah Rutkoff and Deborah Stratman, among others.

Non-fiction will once again have its meeting place in the 13th edition of Point of view, which will convert to Pamplona at the epicenter of the international audiovisual community of the March 11 to 16, 2019. The Festival has announced the first details of its program and has made public the image that will represent it in its next edition.

Punto de Vista programming will be organized in seven big sections: la Official Section which will include the films selected from among the more than 1,160 that were registered from countries around the world; the Retrospectives, which will analyze essential figures of non-fiction; Docbizia, a new line of the latest edition that will bring together artists from different disciplines to exchange their way of relating to reality; the Point of View Labs, as a space for the exchange of knowledge and collective creation; the Contemporary Spotlights, monographic sessions through which Punto de Vista focuses its gaze on some of the most relevant filmmakers on the international scene; the Special Sessions, with programs such as Educational Program, which grows to continue opening the Festival to new audiences.

The image that will accompany Punto de Vista in this edition has also been revealed. Actually, this year there is no image, nor is there a single poster. There are four images and there are four posters. The artist Dani Sanchis has created a visual universe where the four posters together solidly form the identity, the concept and the multidisciplinary, integrative and versatile point of view of cinema as the Festival understands and transmits it.

Programming

Regarding the programming previews presented, it is worth noting that this year the publication of Punto de Vista will revolve around the figure of the American filmmaker Jonathan Schwartz. In addition to this book, the festival will show his filmography in one of its Retrospectives. It will be curated in collaboration with the American curator and academic Irina Leimbacher, and will consist of a tribute series that will bring together his films along with those of filmmakers he admired. Schwartz, who died last October at the age of 45, was an experimental film director who made more than 20 short films in 16mm for more than a decade. These “miniatures,” as he liked to call them, are delicate, exuberant, contemplative films based on the idea of ​​visual and sound collage.

The book will be edited by Garbiñe Ortega, artistic director of Punto de Vista, and will feature the contributions of a long list of prestigious writers, academics and filmmakers such as Erika Balsom, Ben Rivers, Max Goldberg, Ben Russell, Michael Sicinski, Irina Leimbacher, Deborah Stratman, Jodie Mack and Rebekah Rutkoff. The content of the book will be in three languages: Spanish, English and Basque.

The renowned American archivist, writer, theorist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger will be one of the protagonists of Punto de Vista Labs. During his visit he will teach a collective creation workshop called Participatory Cinema: Montage above the Algorithm, in collaboration with the Huarte Contemporary Art Center and the Elías Querejeta Film School. Over several sessions, attendees will collectively make a feature-length documentary based on local film archives that will be presented on the last day of the Festival. In this way, participants will analyze the function of archival material as active memory of the 21st century using cases such as those of Lost Landscapes, a series of “historical interventions” developed by Prelinger. In addition, the filmmaker will present two programs curated by himself and will teach a masterclass developed in collaboration with the Faculty of Communication of the University of Navarra. Prelinger is at the center of the debate about the large amount of manipulable material and files available in the digital age. He has made his enormous collection of thousands of films accessible for free on his Internet Archive digital platform. These questions will be addressed in these programs where Prelinger will show films from his own collection.

Collaboration with Tate

Another of the great initiatives framed this year within the Punto de Vista Labs programming will be the celebration of Museum of Clouds. Punto de Vista is thus associated with one of the most prestigious art institutions in the world, the iconic Tate Modern in London, which inaugurated this cycle in October 2018 and will have in Pamplona the first headquarters in the world to host this traveling project. Museum of Clouds is a program that will bring together a cloud of professionals whose work has changed the cinematographic landscape in the last decade. Thus, the initiative is presented as a unique meeting point for international curatorship. Filmmakers, programmers and writers will meet to explore sharing their philosophy, practice and work methodologies.

Finally, the Festival has announced its intention to grow the Educational Program which was launched in the last edition to open itself to new audiences. Thus, this year it will be expanded considerably with a greater number of training activities aimed mainly at children and young people. Punto de Vista aims to open itself to its community with a series of programs for audiovisual awareness and appreciation, giving these audiences tools to build their own view of the reality that surrounds them, developing critical thinking and also turning them into bearers of these values ​​in their own environment.

The Educational Program will include the workshop “All possible cities”, taught by filmmakers Maider Fernández and Aitor Gametxo; the “Activisssime” workshop, with the Colombian artist Iván Argote; a “Children's Series”, with short animated films and documentary films aimed at boys and girls; the “Morning School Sessions”, with screenings for different centers of the city; the “Images through” workshop, taught by Aratza Santesteban and Mari Luiz Esteban; and, finally, the “Dràc Magic Workshop”, led by the Dràc Magic collective from Barcelona and on documentary film and gender perspective for high school students.

Along with all these advances, the plot line for Dokbizia has been outlined, a line of programming initiated in the last edition and which constitutes an interdisciplinary meeting that brings together artists from different practices to exchange their way of relating to reality. The first year of Dokbizia the theme was “So give me a body”, and this year, continuing with a corporeal conceptual line, taking as a starting point a quote from the artist and performer Meredith Monk: “The voice never lies.” From this suggestive and provocative statement, Punto de Vista activates a space in which “voice as a world and the world as cinema” is understood, and where filmmakers, performers, theorists, sound artists and musicians will come to share their work related to the subtleties of the voice, (self) listening, mediation, translation and polyphony. The entire program for this cycle will soon be announced, which will include screenings, performative conferences, readings, concerts and experimental sound interventions by internationally renowned artists.

Supporting the programmatic proposals, the work started in previous years to seek collaborations and partners continues in the 13th edition. Punto de Vista will consolidate and grow its relationship from previous editions with entities such as the Pamplona City Council, the Caja Navarra Foundation, the Planetarium, the Navarra Film Library, the Huarte Contemporary Art Center or the Elías Querejeta Film School in Donostia; but it adds new traveling companions such as the Faculty of Communication of the University of Navarra or the joint proposals that are being worked on with film schools in the state.