Visions Carte Blanche, Montreal, 2025
A trio of portraits that come from the cinema, each made possible by collective contexts, from Cuba and Indonesia. Each an adventure of sight and sound. These stunning miniatures are flag bearers for a global fringe, masterworks in the young lives of these artists.
Presbicia (Presbyopia) by Juan Pablo Donoso 11 minutes 2025
Not Yet by Roberto Tarazona 20 minutes 2024
Pipit Dalam Badai (Sparrow in a Storm) by Van Luber Parensen 22 minutes 2023
Presbicia (Presbyopia) by Juan Pablo Donoso 11 minutes 2025
Shot in Cuba, a ghost island where the population is fleeing its gangster government and crumbling infrastructures. This portrait of Venus (pronounced Vay-nooze), a young Cuban filmmaker, was made on the threshold of her departure. Juan Pablo brings a suite of strong frames, sure and steady, creating an essay out of everyday fragments and encounters. He has eyes for the only plant on the street, the kid who invents a second life in trees, and most of all the fragile hand that waits for him on the folded sheet. The title refers to a common medical condition that comes with aging, a hardening of the iris causing close-up objects to appear blurry.
Not Yet by Roberto Tarazona 20 minutes 2024
There are no words that might conjure the mysteries central to this movie. The spirit that walks alongside “you.” The car ride that opened its doors to the already dead. The filmmaker invites us into the darkness of a world without orientation, where every old compass needs to be set aside. Deep in the forests of Cuba, far from cities and any semblance of government, the poorest of the poor have created unfathomable lives of ritual and work, where the frontiers between life and death are crossed every day, and the spirits invite their charge to fly. Carefully observed and masterfully shot, with a deep ethics of friendship, the filmmaker joins his subjects on the other side.
Pipit Dalam Badai (Sparrow in a Storm) by Van Luber Parensen 22 minutes 2023
This essay film is also a home movie, a fiction, a poem of resistance that unfolds in a fog of indistinct boundaries. A sophisticated anti-colonial document, it reflects on the ways “Europe” lives on as wound and dream destination, as the gateway to modernity that creates a terrifying cascade of separations—between human and non-human, fathers and children, flower and weed, master and slave. As a reflection on reflections it doesn’t come to any conclusions, it’s hope is to set thought into motion in a suite of beautiful frames that carry the pulse of life itself, all buoyed by comrades at the co-op, pitching in to make it all possible.
