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Lucas Weglinski’s fiction feature debut “The Night is a Farce” (“A Noite É Uma Farsa”) has been picked up by burgeoning Brazilian distribution company Descoloniza Filmes, which has worked on projects such as IDFA winner “Canuto’s Transformation.”

Selected for the pix-in-post Wip Iberoamericana showcase at Sanfic Industria, the industry arm of Chile’s Santiago International Film Festival (Sanfic), the film has also recently welcomed a German co-producer in Berlin-based Weltfilm.

“The Night is a Farce” trails Yá, an Indigenous girl with no memories, and Jorge, a non-binary artist, two people trying to survive the criminalization of their lives while being pursued by a so-called “TikTok policeman” — a national celebrity who illegally turns his young following into a surveillance network. While Yá searches for her identity through dreams of a Jaguar Woman, Jorge guides her through the labyrinths of the biggest metropolis in South America.

Weglinski — who previously directed...

"Signs of Chaos: The Films of Rogerio Sganzerla" plays November 1–30, 2019 at Spectacle Theater in New York.“The experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans,” the film critic Robert Warshow wrote in 1948, in his remarkable essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” Warshow considered gangsterism to be not just one more expression of chaotic urban life; rather, gangsterism represented modernity itself. “For the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it: not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.”In many ways, the Brazilian avant-garde filmmaker Rogério Sganzerla gives us the gangster that epitomizes Warshow’s thesis. Sganzerla’s brisk, jazzy, Nouvelle Vague-inspired black-and-white gangster movie, The Red Light Bandit (1968), which is often discussed as one of the central features in the Brazilian Marginal Cinema aesthetic,...

Yann Gonzalez, rated as one of France’s most gifted young directors after his heartfelt Giallo homage “Knife + Heart” played in 2018’s Cannes competition, has boarded “Brasília! Brasília!” from Brazil’s Bernardo Zanotta who last year won Locarno’s Pardino d’Argento for best short film with “Heart of Hunger.”

Gonzalez served as president of the Pardino d’Argento award, saw in Zanotta a kindred subversive spirit in an increasingly conformist landscape and when Zanotta sent him an early treatment of Brasília!Brasília!” wanted to form part of the project.

Introduced to the market at Locarno’s Match Me! Forum by André Mielnik, “Brasília Brasília!”, which is another’s feature debut, is being co-developed by Gustavo Beck and Mielnik at their Rio de Janeiro-based If You Hold a Stone and Gonzalez and partner Flavien Giorda at their upcoming French production company.

Written by Zanotta and Larissa Lewandowski, “Brasília!Brasília!” embodies...

Above: Pedro Costa's Horse Money

The Locarno Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 67th edition, taking place this August between the 6th and 16th. It speaks for itself, but, um, wow...

"Every film festival, be it small or large, claims to offer, if not an account of the state of things, then an updated map of the art form and the world it seeks to represent. This cartography should show both the major routes and the byways, along with essential places to visit and those that are more unusual. The Festival del film Locarno is no exception to the rule, and I think that looking through the program you will be able to distinguish the route map for this edition." — Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director

Above: Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France

Concorso Internazionale (Official Competition)

A Blast (Syllas Tzoumerkas, Greece/Germany/Netherlands)

Alive (Jungbum Park, South Korea)

Horse Money (Pedro Costa,...

In a piece for Design Observer on "The Enduring Influence of Richard Hollis," Rick Poynor suggests that the graphic and book designer, writer and lecturer "is probably best known for his books Graphic Design: A Concise History (1994) and Swiss Graphic Design (2006)," but I'd imagine that most of us first encountered Hollis's work the day we first picked up a copy of John Berger's Ways of Seeing (see, too, of course, the recent roundup on the television series). The impact of that layout, with the opening lines of text beginning right there on the cover, incorporated as a visual component, and the way that, in turn, as Hollis himself notes, "images behave almost as text" is unforgettable: "This is an attempt to replicate the experience of the television viewer, who looks and listens at the same moment."

Back to Poynor:

In 1981, working at a book production company called Reproduction Drawings,...

Above: Ozualdo Ribeiro Candeias’ A margem (The Margin, 1967).

"I will never transmit sanitised ideas, eloquent discourses or plastic images before the garbage (…) Crushed and exploited, the colonized can only invent their own form of suffocation: the scream of protest comes from an abortive ‘mise en scene’ (…) I’ll continue to make an underdeveloped cinema by condition and vocation, barbarian and ours, anticulturalist (…)" —Rogério  Sganzerla, The Aesthetics of Garbage

Not even garbage escapes retrospective respectability; what was once reviled by snobby film buffs has now become their new gospel. Subcultural capital (that which is “hip” and “illicit”) is usually outsourced from our business enemies (China, Iran, etc.) or from forgotten episodes of film history. One wonders what will the subject of a retrospective be in 30 or 40 years when the whole globe will have been converted to consumer fundamentalism. Now that our visual economy is funded on total exposure and immediate consumption,...

We have a report or two from the International Film Festival Rotterdam on the way, so this'll be something of a supplementary roundup, collecting reviews, impressions and so on from the festival that runs through Sunday. The first main event would have to be the world premiere of the film Takashi Miike is now calling Ace Attorney. The Iffr has posted a video record of Gawie Keyser's "Big Talk" with Miike that took place on Saturday. The introduction's in Dutch, and it's followed by a trailer with English subtitles (much longer, too, than the first trailer) and the conversation itself is a mingling of questions in English and answers in Japanese with Dutch subtitles. Miike obsessives, though, will be able to sort out what's being said.

"The Iffr and Miike have been friendly towards each other ever since Audition had a few legendary screenings over here back in 2000, and it...