Gabriela Golder, Conversation Piece, 2012, HD, color, sound, 19 minutes.

“THIS FILM WAS MADE for very little money, with very few people,” the great Brazilian filmmaker Júlio Bressane told his mainly Argentine audience. He paused. “And it was never released. Nobody saw it. There would be three people at the beginning, and they would all run away before the film was over. This room right now has more people than have ever seen it before. So thank you very much for coming, I hope you enjoy it, and we can have a conversation with whoever is still here at the end.”

Seventeen of Bressane’s films (roughly half his output) screened during the fifteenth edition of the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI) last month. “We are the few for Bressane,” a fellow critic said apologetically before a press screening of the filmmaker’s latest, O batuque dos Astros ([The drumming beat of stars)], a jaunt through Lisbon locales once inhabited by or honoring the poet Fernando Pessoa. But no apology was needed. These dementedly titled, delirious films—among them Killed the Family and Went to the Movies (1969), The Herb of the Rat (2008), and The Caraíba Monster—New Ancient History of Brazil (1975)—unfold with a graceful calamity that provides its own justification. These are products of years of concentrated thought, typically shot in less than two weeks, and they often discard plot in favor richly colored musical moments containing drunken characters who gleefully assault each other, with Bressane’s crew sometimes intervening to show them how to do it better. One senses that in, while watching a Bressane film, that society’s foundations are being attacked so as to encourage people to relax and enjoy themselves. In the sublime A Love Movie (2003), total sexual freedom gives lovers such a lift that they can even fly.

The retrospectives at this most recent edition of BAFICI claimed attention during what proved to be a weak year for the largest South American festival’s international competition (whose top prize went to Peter Strickland’s British horror film Berberian Sound Studio) and an even weaker one year for its national one (whose Best Film was Santiago Loza’s family drama La Paz). They included highlights from Argentine cinema’s past fifteen years, an extensive survey of Austrian avant-garde film, four documentaries by Swiss chronicler of mountain life Erich Langjahr, and fifteen works by South Korea’s prolific Hong Sang-soo, headlined by his latest tragicomic treasure, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon. The repertory films generally played on 35-mm archival prints of varying condition, with digital restorations reserved for recent Hollywood classics like House of Bamboo (1965), The King of Comedy (1983), The Fly (1986), and They Live (1988).

The lone DCP revelation was the joint Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema/Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage restoration of Peter Brook’s multifaceted Vietnam War exploration, Tell Me Lies: A Film About London (1968). The film—adapted from an ensemble-shaped Royal Shakespeare Company theatrical production called US that Brook also directed—was condemned upon its very brief initial theatrical run for not taking a clear position on the war. Tell Me Lies consists of sketches and scene fragments in which civilians debate the war, sometimes directly to the camera, without achieving resolution. Its position is that all clear views on the subject (both pro and con) should be distrusted. At one point, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael calmly argues that the Viet Cong act in self-defense, as the oppressed always do when committing violence against the oppressor; at another, a representative of the American Embassy (played by British actor Kingsley Amis) says that the most powerful nation in the history of the world should be admired for using more restraint in asserting itself than any other world power ever has. While most much of 1960s political cinema currently feels dated, Tell Me Lies’s dialogic structure—in which ideas themselves, rather than people, do battle—has kept the film fresh and relevant to wars being fought today.

A lesson of Brook’s film is that one cannot judge without first understanding. The same lesson emerged from my favorite new Argentine work at BAFICI, Conversation Piece, a short video by the artist Gabriela Golder adapted from a previous three-screen installation. (Some of Golder’s 2000 short video In memory of the birds work can be seen on last year’s antennae collection home viewing release, Dialéctica en Suspenso: Argentine Experimental Film and Video.) It consists of Golder’s mother and two young nieces reading The Communist Manifesto out loud together, with the grandmother patiently answering whenever one of the girls asks a question. The older woman explains terms like “Communism,” “manifesto,” “oppressor,” “abolish,” “political struggle,” and “revolution” in clear, simple language while leaving the girls to form their own beliefs. Exposing them to political thought becomes a way of sharing love.

— Aaron Cutler

The fifteenth Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) ran April 10–21, 2013.