Jun 26, 2011 at 7:30 pm
Cuchillo de Palo
With Marta Andreu, Carlos A. Gutiérrez
Cuchillo de Palo by Renate Costa
Spain/ Paraguay, 2010, 91 minutes, digital projection
The work in Cuchillo de Palo reflects on the search of the right place for the filmmaker, not only in the film but also in the filmed world: How to place oneself when filming an unknown family story closely related to a historical period of your country? We could say that to face a shared past is to write, under the same gesture, both a piece of History and your own point of view on it. So it would be about admitting the place from where you give a name to that world. But how to frame your own father when he just wants to keep silent or has a completely opposite way of understanding things? Maybe to admit your own place is to assume as well that the place of the others might be different. Therefore, let’s be ready to create a film made of the space constructed between you and the others, crossed by words, looks, silence and light. Let’s be ready to be looked by those who you are looking at through your lens.
Marta Andreu, the executive producer, has curated and coordinated the Master in Creative Documentary at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona since 2001. Within the university she runs the documentary writing program, supervising the development of student projects. She has worked with filmmakers such as Kossakovsky, Philibert, Dvortsevoy, Mograbi, Stonys, Claire Simon, Lanzman, Marcel Lozinski, JVdK, and Frederick Wiseman. In 2004 she created Estudi Playtime, a production company devoted to producing creative documentaries. Since 2009 she designs, programs and runs the workshops and seminars at DocMontevideo. Since 2006 she has run documentary writing and development workshops and masterclasses at different centers and festivals (Atlantida, Bogotá, Barcelona, Madrid, Tarragona, Tanger, Lisboa). Since 2006 she has been part of the jury of L’Alternativa (Barcelona), PlayDoc (Galíca), Alcances (Cádiz), Punto de Vista (Pamplona), Festival de Cine Internacional de Gijón, Festival de Cine Internacional de Cali. She also runs “Docs-in-progress”, produced by “PlayDoc”, a program that takes documentaries that are in progress and divides them into multiple, smaller documentaries.
