SPECIAL GUEST: CARLOS FERRAND
It is VLAFF’s pleasure to welcome in Vancouver one of Canada’s most innovative and prolific Latin-Canadian filmmakers, Montreal based director CARLOS FERRAND, who will be in attendance to present three of his works, (plus a very special secret screening).
CARLOS FERRAND was born in Lima, Peru. From Lima to Brussels, Paris and Vermont, he spent several years studying and wandering about but with film always at the core of his interests. For the past 40 years he has worked in Canada as a screenwriter, director, and director of photography on over fifty film projects, both fiction and documentary. Some of his directorial highlights include his feature documentary Jongué, A Nomad’s Journey (screened at VLAFF 2020), 13, A Ludodrama about Walter Benjamin (which made its international premiere at the 2019 Venice Film Festival), and Americano (2007), a road movie from Patagonia to the Arctic, which has been presented in over twenty-five film festivals and has won numerous prizes and nominations. His film Visionaries (1999) produced by InformAction won Best Cinematography and Best Overall Sound at Hot Docs and The Magic Touch, about Dominique Lemieux, costume designer for Le Cirque du Soleil, won three Gémeaux Awards, including Best Cultural Documentary.
Monday, Sept 11 at 2:00 PM
Cineworks
From Patagonia to Nunavut, over the course of four years, Carlos Ferrand took a road trip to visit dear friends, men and women he had met during his wanderings across the continent: parents, filmmakers and teachers, the cook from his childhood home, a doctor; all bearers of a memory and of strong and significant stories, which he wanted to bring out of the shadows. Stories that bear witness to the great political upheavals of recent years and that invite us, each in their own way, to question our identity.
Community Partner:
Saturday, Sept 9 at 4:00 PM
The Cinematheque
Peru | 1975 [finalized in 1982] | 28 min
Transfert numérique d’un film 35 mm noir et blanc
Cimarrones is the first – and to this day, the only – fiction film dedicated to telling the history of Afro-Peruvians. It was shot in 1975 in the Herbay Alto cooperative, south of Lima, with mainly amateur actors. Based on primary archival research and written with poet Enrique Verástegui, the story is composed as a kind of Western in which enslaved African people are delivered from their oppressors by a band of Cimarrones, or escaped rebels living in freedom. It was completed in 1982, after Ferrand had immigrated to Quebec, with support from the National Film Board of Canada. The introductory sequence was filmed in Montreal with two local actors (a woman in the French version presented here, and a man in the English version). In recent years, with the rise of social movements fighting for racial justice, there has been a resurgence of interest in the film, both in Quebec and in Peru. An artist’s book on Cimarrones was produced by Ferrand especially for this exhibition.
PIRATE MECHANICS OF LIMA
Mécanicos piratas de Lima
Saturday, Sept 9 at 4:00 PM
The Cinematheque
Peru | 1973 [finalized in 2021] | 21 min
Transfert numérique d’un film 8 mm noir et blanc
Shot in 1973 and finalized in 2021, Mecánicos piratas de Lima follows a group of men working as car mechanics on the outskirts of Lima. Featuring a number of close-up views, “moving portraits” of the men, the film focuses on the ingenuity and resourcefulness required to survive under conditions of great social inequality. It bears witness to the practice of keeping and repairing automobiles for many years, and of repurposing fragments from those that have finally ceased to function.The man-made hole in the ground used by the mechanics to reach under the chassis is a prime example of the do-it-yourself approach that pervades Peru’s predominantly informal economy.