[Frameworks] US premiere of the films of Juan Sebastián Bollaín!

Thu Jun 2 18:37:17 UTC 2022

Of interest to all, and online so accessible to all…

On 6/2/22, 9:41 AM, "LA Filmforum" <lafilmforum at gmail.com> wrote:

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Juan Sebastián Bollaín:
A Most Wanted Idea of Utopia
Two programs of works
never seen in the US!
Online June 4-19

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Juan Sebastián Bollaín: A Most Wanted Idea of Utopia
Two programs of works never seen in the US
Online June 4-19
Live Conversation with guest curator Elena Duque on Sunday June 12, 1 pm Pacific Time

U.S. premieres!  Newly subtitled films!
Curated by Elena Duque.  Introductory prerecorded videos with Juan Sebastián Bollaín!

Ticketing for Juan Sebastián Bollaín: A Most Wanted Idea of Utopia, program 1
Sliding Scale, requested $12 for general admission, $8 students/seniors, $0 for Filmforum members, here
Includes admission to program 2 as well!

Ticketing for Juan Sebastián Bollaín: A Most Wanted Idea of Utopia, program 2
Sliding Scale, requested $12 for general admission, $8 students/seniors, $0 for Filmforum members, here

 Register in advance for the conversation with Elena Duque on June 12 here:
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

JUAN SEBASTIÁN BOLLAÍN. A MOST WANTED IDEA OF UTOPIA
By Elena Duque
Self-taught filmmaker and architect, Juan Sebastián Bollaín has been making films since the 60s, mixing his two study disciplines along the years in a series of films that reinvent the urbanism of the most traditional and religious city in Spain: Seville, Andalusia, the heart of the Spanish clichés, Holy Week and flamenco. Using super 8 and various tricks and montage strategies, he made at the end of the 70's a series of imaginative visions of the city, delirious utopias full of sense of humor, surrealist and poignant images and lucid ideas that shake the core of the ideas about the city. A cult figure of Spanish Cinema whose work has been recently digitized and restored, a most wanted idea of utopia in these dystopian and strange times.

Born in Madrid in 1945, and a Sevillan citizen from a very early age, Juan Sebastián Bollaín is a filmmaker, architect and urban planner. He has also worked as a teacher and book editor. All these professions revolve around his interest in architecture and his idea of a better way of inhabiting the city. He began making films at 14 years old, and he directed several amateur fictions and documentaries. In the late 70s he made some of his most important films: the essay film La Alameda ‘78, a commission from the Architecture School in Seville, the futurist fiction C.A.7.9., under the auspices of Cádiz Architecture School, and his tetralogy “Dreaming of Sevilla”, four humourous and delirious super 8 pieces on an utopian Seville that were part of a big project that also included a written research. Besides making these kinds of works, he has written and directed several feature length fiction films, tv series and commissioned documentaries, while continuing his work as an architect designing buildings and making urban plannings. He lives and works in Seville.

Notes by guest curator Elena Duque. 
Special thanks to Ramón Benítez, Filmoteca de Andalucía, Junta de Andalucía; Kate Brown, Marta Fernández Gómez, Rocío Mesa, and L.A. OLA

For more information: www.lafilmforum.org or 323-377-7238.

SEVILLA 2030 (Juan Sebastián Bollaín, 2003, 28 min.) US Premiere!

Screening:

PROGRAM 1- SEVILLE, THE BEST PLACE TO LIVE
In this first program, we will see four films devoted to imagining a brave new crazy and marvellous city, guided by hedonism and a peculiar sense of community. The best place to live in the world.

TETRALOGY “DREAMING OF SEVILLE”
Composed of the films:
Sevilla tuvo que ser (Juan Sebastián Bollaín, 1979, 10 min.)
Sevilla en tres niveles (Juan Sebastián Bollaín, 1979, 9 min.)
Sevilla rota (Juan Sebastián Bollaín, 1979, 12 min.)
La ciudad en el recuerdo (Juan Sebastián Bollaín, 1979, 14 min.)
This foundational tetralogy shot in super 8 depicts a delirious and amazing Sevilla, in a subversive response to the living conditions in the city at the end of the 70s. Using various styles, such as mockumentary, avant garde and surrealist fiction and also more impressionistic visions, a compendium of what the city is and could be. Sevilla tuvo que ser is a “found” reportage of the American television telling to the world the progressive vision of Seville citizens: from the broadcast of the porn week in the billboards of the city to the monuments devoted to the “café con leche” (coffee with milk) and to the glass of bear. Sevilla en tres niveles is also a fake reportage that depicts the illusory division in the city in three levels: the outsiders and criminals live in peace in the roofs of the city, the workers and capitalism slaves, stressed and fast, live at the street level. In the underground, there is a Seville of the past, with people of ancient times still living there. Sevilla rota is a surrealist fiction in which marvelous montages take us to a place where you can see the sea at turning a corner, or in which the cars circulate in the sidewalks and people are drinking in the middle of the street. Finally, La ciudad en el recuerdo begins as a “symphony of the city”, showing its rhythms and light in poetic time lapses, ending with a tough critique on marketing and capitalism taking over the city.

SEVILLA 2030 (Juan Sebastián Bollaín, 2003, 28 min.)
Twenty years later, Bollaín comes back from an Ugandan satellite to revise the Utopian Seville he described in his tetralogy. In this new city everything can happen: turning the Seville Cathedral in an olympic pool, or living in a city in which citizens participate actively in making it the funniest and most liveable place in the world.

PROGRAM 2. THE CITY TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
Two films in which Bollaín reflects on urgent urbanistic problems using different and imaginative approaches.

LA ALAMEDA ‘78  (Juan Sebastián Bollaín, 1978, 40 min.)
La Alameda is an emblematic place of Seville, a popular neighborhood degraded but at the same time full of life. In the face of an urbanistic project that planned to destroy the neighborhood to build new apartments (the menace of gentrification before the term was a common place), Bollaín received a commission from the Architecture School to document La Alameda before the disaster (that finally never happened). In an intelligent montage of sound and image, Bollaín reproduces the life of the neighborhood, its history and idiosyncrasy, mixing it with some bold cinematic movements: depicting the making of the films, and imagining and showing metaphorical performances that talk with eloquence of the problems of the city, and criticizes the predatory politics over the lives of the citizens.

C.A.7.9. UN ENIGMA DE FUTURO (Juan Sebastián Bollaín, 1979, 30 min.)
After the commission related to La Alameda, Bollaín received a new commission to revise yet another urbanistic plan through cinema. This time, he deals with the expansion of Cádiz, an Andalusian coastal city near Seville. The city is located in a very thin ism, making it very difficult to respond to the growth of the population because of the lack of terrains. This time he uses a sort of science fiction approach: in the year 4.000, when the city of Cádiz has already disappeared a long time ago, a group of archaeologists try to reconstruct what happened to the city using “old” documents, trying to grasp what lead the city to the disaster.

Elena Duque - Guest Curator
Spanish-Venezuelan Elena Duque is a filmmaker, programmer, writer and teacher. She currently programmes and directs the editorial department of (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico in A Coruña and she is an associate programmer at the Seville European Film Festival. She is a professor at the Camilo José Cela University in Madrid and she teaches workshops and gives lectures in different institutions and master degrees. She has also made several animated and experimental short films.

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Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2022 is our 47th year.

Coming Soon:
June 26 - Actual/Virtual Realities: Harun Farocki’s Parallel & Related Visions, in person
Late June - Womanhouse, online!

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