Neorealism and newrealism
The road map this retrospective tries to describe and create is the journey of the seeds planted by the neorealist experiment, introducing works that question the concept of documentary as privileged film genre considering its relationship with reality, and in order to do so focusing on the representation of such reality. This is a partial selection – in both time and space – whose goal is to suggest other relationships between other filmographies.
Technical conditions for mobility and small teams allowed cinema to be critic, witness and researcher, looking at those who had been so far invisible: a “portable cinema” creating poetry from the popular imaginary and the ability people have to self-reflection: La Terra trema, Umberto D.
Subarnarekha is part of a trilogy on refugees by Ritwik Ghatak, and one of the fundamental films of India's Parallel Cinema. Gatak himself was a refugee during East Bengali’s great crisis in 47.
In Adela Adolfo Alix Jr. films Anita Linda (a former radio diva) in the slums of Manila, building an analysis of Philippine’s violent class system, in a game of self-fiction by those who are filmed.
In 1961 Mackenzie directed The Exiles, with the Native American community in the outskirts of LA: those who do not belong anywhere, emerging in long takes that build up a “realism of duration” (R. Koehler).
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu by Cristi Puiu is key to understand Romanian New Wage Cinema. The author and the camera’s point of view are alternative to the totalitarian state imaginary, in a minimalistic principle (both narrative and pictorial) reflecting a possible realism in cinema.
From Portugal, Os Mutantes, by Teresa Villaverde: in a country disappointed by an unfulfilled revolution and numbed by the European dream, outcast institutionalised teenagers wander around in a parallel reality to the Lisbon of the 90’s. Commited to reality, cinema refused aesthetic and political constraints of traditional documentary and engaged in a pact with the people and with cinema itself.