Selection 5 - WHAT IS IRONY, IF NOT MELANCHOLY?

28 March, 2024 - 22:15
Sphinx Cinema 3
TICKETS

 What is irony, if not a way of turning language towards itself, exposing the layers of violence that articulate our relationship with the world — this hopeless distance between desire and reality? What is irony if not a way to intervene in the gap between politics and poetry? A place to stand in contradiction?

Daniela Delgado’s work is a delicate, poignant, yet sharply ironic view of colonialism and the ways of resilience that cinema can take against it. She uses the specific film’s devices and materials to shake and playfully defy the forms of representation that the colonialist gaze builds and leads to shape the world. Combined with a deep, almost tragic, but mostly bright language, Delgado reflects on the human craving to belong and the dwelling with nostalgia.

In a more dreamlike tone, Past Perfect by Jorge Jácome asks, Where does it hurt? It is the untraceable sadness that perhaps follows being stuck in the in-between: belonging somewhere that is not quite reachable, that is not quite anywhere. Where does it hurt? How do you answer this question if there’s nowhere to point out? Perhaps humor is a way; perhaps film is the place.

So the question stands when Daniela asks, What is irony, if not melancholy?

 

In the presence of Daniela Delgado Viteri & Jorge Jácome

 

Curated by Mireia Montané

In collaboration with EQZE - Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola

We All Want a Place to Call Our Own

Daniela Delgado Viteri
,
EC, ES
,
2022
,
DCP
,
12'

A hairdresser’s shop in Madrid is crowded with people who come to see and touch a replica of the Virgin of Quinche. A priest proposes to take the statue to a church downtown. The story continues when the replica of the Virgin is returned to the barbershop after an angry crowd disagrees with the way the priest handles things. So, I decide to write a letter to the priest. Offer him a deal he can’t refuse. 

Shortcuts

Daniela Delgado Viteri
,
EC, ES
,
2019
,
DCP
,
18'

Small acts of subversive resistance — teasing tourists, crashing election parties, insulting filmmakers — in five fictive interviews with ordinary citizens who refuse to submit to the powers that be. 

Past Perfect

Jorge Jácome
,
PT
,
2019
,
DCP
,
23'

Many cities or countries have a distinct malaise. They are places that could be Portugal, so sunk in a painful longing of the past, and where each tension of the present is only the tip of an iceberg that is explained in successive retreats that can go straight until origin of the species, at least. This feeling common to many latitudes is often presented as a diagnosis, a denial of a painful present as opposed to the desire to return to a glorious past.

Antonio Valencia

Daniela Delgado Viteri
,
EC, ES
,
2020
,
DCP
,
6'

An imaginary dialogue with Antonio Valencia, which culminates, as it should be, with a goal cry.