13/02/2009

Volker Koepp’s German film Elder Blossom will today open the 5th Punto de Vista Documentary Film Festival, to be held in Pamplona from February 13-21. The event will close with UK director Peter Greenaway’s Dutch title Rembrandt's J'accuse [+see also:
trailer
film profile].

As usual, the line-up focuses on documentaries in all their forms, with a special emphasis on innovative productions. The festival’s main attraction is the official section, which is divided into two parts, one for features and another for shorts, with 13 titles in each.

Latin American films are particularly well represented in this year’s features section, with six titles selected. Meanwhile, there are five European films on the programme: Olivier Dury’s Mirages (France), Harmut Bitomsky’s Dust (Germany), Avi Mograbi’s Z32 (Israel/France), Audrius Stonys’ Four Steps (Lithuania), and Sergei Loznitsa’s Revue (Germany/Russia/Ukraine). The line-up is completed by one US film and a Japanese production.

Festival audiences will also have the opportunity to discover the work of two filmmakers who are practically unknown in Spain: Canada’s Peter Lynch and the UK’s Ben Rivers, who are the focus of two retrospectives.

Moreover, both directors are members of the international jury, alongside independent producer Marta Andreu, film expert Hans-Joachim Schlegel and Professor José Enrique Monterde.

Punto de Vista will also host a retrospective dedicated to US director James Benning and another – entitled “The afterlife of images” – that looks at the concept of appropriation or montage.

Regular sidebar “The Central Region” will zoom in on new trends and “Heterodocsias” will show a selection of unfinished documentaries.

(Translated from Spanish)