Simone Rapisarda Casanova

A boy in rural Haiti develops an interest in cinema and helps his father acquire a TV set.

Set in the breathtaking landscapes of the Apuan Alps in Tuscany, near the Gothic Line where German forces massacred hundreds of civilians before their retreat at the end of WWII. Pacifico Pieruccioni, a shepherd born just following the war, is now one of its last freedom fighters. He is being forced to abandon this life, as his very existence, suspended between the phantoms of a bloody past and the harbingers of an obscure future, must bow to the gestation of the new Europe to come (VIFF synopsis).

Less than a month after Simone Rapisarda Casanova completed shooting in Juan Antonio, a village on Cuba’s North Eastern coast, the place was wiped out by a hurricane. Thus El árbol de las fresas begins with four of the now displaced former inhabitants reminiscing about their home and what they have lost. Eschewing drama and pathos, the opening sets the tone for what is an unusual documentary; the subjects often address the camera directly and even tease the filmmaker. In doing so they disrupt the usual relationship between viewer and subject in a playful way that allows both the viewer and the viewed to share equally in the filmmaking process.

Set in the majestic landscapes of the sovereign Indigenous territories of Canada’s west coast, In the Garden of Forking Paths was almost entirely filmed solo by children. Handing a tiny omnidirectional camera from one to another and transforming it into an instrument to explore wondrous parallel universes, the children-filmmakers lead us on a mesmerizing adventure of perception. Their ingenuity evokes both the ideal of an eye unconstrained by habits of perspective and the utopia of a cinema freed from technology by means of technology itself. Thanks to a lyrical intertwining of ethnography, play and reverie, the film becomes a touching invitation to reimagine entanglements among humans, nonhumans, and the world surrounding them.