27/03/2023 - Pamplona is again the setting for this audiovisual event, which this year will be held from 27 March-1 April, with seven sections that focus on the most daring, unclassifiable and avant-garde cinema

The 17th Punto de Vista festival — promoted by the Government of Navarre and organised by the public company NICDO — will be held in Pamplona from Monday 27 March to Saturday 1 April. Manuel Asín, its artistic director, and Teresa Morales de Álava, executive director, presented this year's programme a few days ago. Around 100 films will be screened in its seven main sections: Official, Retrospectives, Spotlights, Lan, Contacts, X Films and Mediation Programme. And eight venues will host its many different, exciting activities: Baluarte, Golem Cinemas, the Oteiza Museum, Pamplona planetarium, Filmoteca de Navarra, Civivox Condestable, Huarte Centre of Contemporary Art and Civican.

The official competitive section will feature six world premieres: the short films Al borde del agua, by Spanish filmmakers Maria Elorza and Iñigo Salaberria; Bide bazterrean hi eta ni kantari, by fellow Spaniard Peru Galbete; Boulevards de la Senne, by Belgium's Juliette Achard and Ian Menoyot; and Teléfono, Navidad, by Argentinian Malena Zambrani; as well as the Spanish feature films APOCALIPSIS 20 21 22, by Julius Richard Tamayo, and Tembiapo Pyharegua, by Elvira Sánchez Poxon and Christian Bagnat.

Completing the official section are the feature films Cette maison, directed by Miryam Charles (Canada); Chaylla [+see also:
film review
film profile], by Claire Teper and Paul Pirritano (France); Leading Lights [+see also:
film review
film profile], by Lydie Wisshaupt-Claudel (Belgium); The River Is Not a Border [+see also:
trailer
film profile], by Alassane Diago (Senegal/Germany/France); Miyama, Kyoto Prefecture, by Rainer Komers (Japan/Germany); Notes for a Film, by Ignacio Agüero (Chile/France); Notre Village, by Comes Chahbazian (Belgium); and Tótem, by Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico (Mexico). And the short films: De songes au songe d’un autre miroir, by Yunyi Zhu (France); El polvo ya no nubla nuestros ojos, by the Colectivo Silencio (Peru); Eventide, by Sharon Lockhart (United States); and Nagyapám kertje, by Gábor Varga (Hungary).

Among its wide variety of events, the festival organisers highlighted the premiere, on 31 March, of the two latest films by the German documentary filmmaker Peter Nestler, who is also the subject of one of the festival's two retrospectives: Injustice and Resistance and The Open View are two 2022 films about the oppression and the history of the Sinti and Roma minorities in Europe.

Also of special note is the retrospective Lejos de los árboles (lit. "Far From the Trees"), which will reflect over six sessions on a reality of our most immediate environment, such as basic necessities for human consumption and the history of how they are produced. This is a question of following the path of a species, our own, which has gradually moved away from the natural environment to which we belong, through forms of production that in recent centuries, or even decades, have compromised the future of all living species, including our own.

And that the festival returns to the Tornamira Room of the Pamplona planetarium, where the filmmaker and visual artist from Madrid Deneb Martos will be presenting Kosmogonía, a film shot in 35mm film with a site-specific performance using the chemigram camera-less film technique to create, with the aid of concave mirrors, a circular projection to fit the hemispherical vault of the planetarium.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)