Frío Metal Since altering its official title from Festival International du Documentaire de Marseille to Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille, FIDMarseille has turn out to be a major premiere-driven trade competition devoted to the expansive style of “creative nonfiction” to incorporate experimental, hybrid and essayistic works, usually with a political ethos. For its thirty sixth version, FID reaffirmed its uncommon outspokenness on Palestine by screening To Gaza (2025) and internet hosting day by day morning screenings of the collective work Some Strings. Through retrospectives of Radu Jude and Chilean duo Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda, the competition additionally appeared intent on signaling that it isn’t solely political, however provocative. FID hosted the latter’s first ever European retrospective, noting that the filmmakers are hardly ever programmed outdoors of South America. For Adriazola and Sepúlveda, this seems, not less than partly, by design. Beyond their filmmaking, they run workshops on the Escuela Popular de Cine (Popular Film School) and manage the Festival de Cine Social y Antisocial (FECISO), which resists the normal city, middle-class gaze that dominates cinephilia by foregrounding cinema for marginal communities.
My favourite movie of the competition was their most up-to-date work Cuadro Negro (2025) which gained the Grand Prix on the Punta del Vista Festival earlier this 12 months from a jury together with FID’s inventive director Cyril Neyrat. So deadpan it’s usually unclear whether or not we’re watching an observational doc or bone-dry satire, this confounding docu-fiction follows “artistic” documentarian Sofía (Sofía Gómez) as she ventures together with her digital camera and tripod into the grounds of the Chilean military—particularly, its titular equestrian acrobatic unit.
Mostly capturing on a low-res handheld digital digital camera, Adriazola and Sepúlveda’s rough-and-ready photographs are antithetical to the pageantry on show. Men and their steeds galloping previous snowy mountains are stripped of their legendary high quality as Sofía belligerently directs the troopers into awkward tableaus, arms lifted feebly as their horses squirm in opposition to them. The challenge reportedly grew out of the administrators’ fascination with horses, which led them to frequent equestrian circles that—unsurprisingly—turned out to be havens for Pinochet-worshipping nationalists. The uneasy entanglement between aesthetics and nationalism is laid naked: the decorative operate of the military’s cavalry and movie-making each depend on a choreography of order and carried out dominance.
Sofía is at instances comically merciless, as when she orchestrates a weird re-enactment of the legendary cavalry officer Alberto Larraguibel Morales setting the world high-jump document on horseback in 1949. She instructs a feminine soldier to imitate Larraguibel’s pose atop a metallic statue mounted on the again of a slow-moving truck (adorned with a cranium and cross-bones insignia, a logo of the Prussian Hussars adopted by the Nazis). Forced right into a half-mount place for hours, the soldier’s teary-eyed expression is caught in a dim close-up after lastly dismounting. Sofía’s ambivalent efficiency as a director is Nathan Fielder-esque: each aloof and calculating, she toys with the authority she assumes, exposing the eerie willingness of her topics to undergo spectacle. Adriazola and Sepúlveda’s anarchic experiment pushes Sofía’s see-sawing energy dynamics to an absolute excessive. At one level, she inexplicably strikes out of her grandmother’s house and strikes in with an older lady who actually prays to Pinochet at evening. Rather than the anticipated rupture, we see a maniacal and surprisingly tender bond develop between the ladies, formed by mutual mistrust.
A fixture on the competition, prolific Mexican director Nicolás Pereda took half on this 12 months’s FidLab along with his upcoming challenge Everything Else is Noise and premiered his newest characteristic, Cobre (2025), which gained the Special Mention. A wry thriller of paperwork that began after Pereda realized in regards to the suspicious dying of an activist protesting labor circumstances in a mining city, Cobre begins as Lázaro (Pereda common Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez) finds a useless physique on his technique to work on the mines.
After Lázaro’s discovery, he turns into slowly encumbered by respiratory points that are met with skepticism by his docs, boss and aunt Rosa (new collaborator Rosa Estela Juárez, becoming a member of a career-long ensemble forged). Pereda doesn’t construct a central narrative across the homicide thriller, however strikes off-center to discover how systemic violence seeps into the inside lives of these on the periphery, juggling tensions between fact, efficiency and deception across the ambiguous origins of Lázaro’s sickness, rumors across the useless physique and Lázaro’s involvement, or white office lies. The Kafkaesque apex emerges when Rosa waits for a supervisor to approve her solid signature on a nondescript doc to keep away from a minor ouroboric workflow delay. Pereda’s static digital camera lingers on her face; her respiration is shallow and unsteady, her eyes dart round timidly. Trauma is first internalized, then slowly made exterior via phantom pains, props and repeated gestures. Lázaro’s compulsive fruit consumption, for example, turns into a unusually sensual middleman for displaced and unmet need. Moments of deliberate efficiency paradoxically mediate moments of fact. When Lázaro units Rosa up on a date along with his creepy older physician in alternate for a free oxygen tank, Lázaro and his mum role-play the encounter with Rosa, asking her comically pointed questions in regards to the tensions inside their very own household. While Lázaro and Rosa carry out, the digital camera pans right down to linger on their palms touching timidly as a sluggish, transgressive need percolates. As at all times, Pereda turns seemingly banal interactions into sly shows of energy.
Winner of the Prix Georges de Beauregard, Clemente Castor’s sophomore characteristic Frío Metal (2025) builds on his debut Príncipe de Paz (2019), persevering with his give attention to adrift youth within the Mexico City suburb of Iztapalapa. Trained on the Béla Tarr movie.manufacturing unit in Sarajevo, Castor—like fellow alumnus Kaori Oda—explores a wealthy dialectic between subterranean areas and the human physique. The result’s a extremely symbolic, syncretic universe during which our bodies collide dizzily with eroded landscapes formed by human interference. A unfastened narrative follows two brothers, Mario (Mario Banderas) and Óscar (Oscar Hernández); the previous wakes up in a physique that’s not his, with “images that don’t belong to him,” whereas Óscar is usually absent, having escaped from rehab and disappeared from the household. The movie’s segments are divided by numerous recreation sequences which function like a secret code accessing alternate cinematic universes. “You will never progress,” a tarot reader tells Mario—an omen adopted by a dreamlike encounter with Lázaro (once more, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez), who teaches him a fancy hand gesture that initiates a spatio-temporal drift between city ruins and mountainous terrain interspersed with non-fiction vignettes of idle suburban youth.
Castor’s work is usually aggressively opaque, guided by a seemingly haphazard modifying logic that intentionally short-circuits narrative momentum because the movie drifts between non-fiction, epistolary voiceover, gestural efficiency and the supernatural, staged by a largely non-professional forged. Although I can’t say I understood every part, I felt so stunned by the feeling of being adrift, teleporting between ever-shifting movie textures and terrains, from the underground to the skies of what appeared like the sting of the world. The movie’s dialectics aren’t strictly ideological however affective: like Mario, I discovered myself clinging to indicators, greedy at symbols, attempting to decode which means from dysfunction in an nearly schizophrenic mode earlier than suspending any need for formal cohesion. The extra Castor tears on the material of actuality, the extra forceful the non-fiction vignettes turn out to be. I preserve returning to the black-and-white 8mm opening shot: a sour-faced roulette woman spins her wheel at a fairground. Even as she hollers for brand spanking new gamers, her face reveals that there aren’t any winners.
Pereda and Castor’s movies each have interaction with the ripple impact of violence born from the extraction of pure sources of their native Mexico with radically totally different strategies. Both filmmakers are much less involved with exterior representations of wrestle than with the inner emotional lives of adrift, working-class people, foregoing documentary for a type extra fantastical as a method of partaking with the circumstances of their collective alienation: one evocatively minimalist; one other dizzyingly maximalist.
An actual discovery for me was French Competition winner Bonne Journée (2025), revamped 4 years with nearly zero price range by visible artist Pauline Bastard, who stays comparatively unknown outdoors France. With a particular type rooted in a sustained dedication to recycling, right here she upends the format of the durational labor movie with one thing extra spritely and camp regardless of remaining largely dialogue-less. At the Emmaüs centre in Grenoble—a cavernous warehouse charity store that sells every part from kettles and electronics to statues and clothes—Bastard turns her gaze to the principally immigrant African employees doing the tedious job of taxonomizing, repairing and displaying the incoming barrage of deserted objects. Bastard rigorously confines us throughout the warehouse, with photographs of the famed Grenoble Alps at all times out of attain past a window, or mirrored off of a pair of wide-eyed glasses adorned by one of many employees.
Another canonical French recycling movie by Agnès Varda involves thoughts, however this extra intently resembles Sarah Maldoror’s Un Dessert pour Constance (1981) which considers the methods during which discovered objects might be re-used for surprising inventive functions and the way the labor of African migrants maintains the pristine look of the Republic. At first, Bastard’s static digital camera observes idling employees sorting via piles of junk—at one level, a six-foot-long shirt regularly unfurls till it eclipses the person holding it. When they uncover cameras in numerous cardboard containers, the employees begin utilizing them to stage their very own photographs. A kitschy trio of lamps and a pair of massive child dolls are positioned gingerly on glittery material; their compatriots mannequin the sartorial items with coy, vogue pouts. Bastard playfully renounces any regular authorial place as her personal body is subsumed by her companions’ views as they rework the detritus of Twenty first-century overproduction into an enormous costume-shop and stage.
These chichi portraits are lastly displayed in frames and displays dispersed all through the store; customers repair their gaze on them with quizzically amused expressions. It’s refreshing to see Bastard delicately reimagine the near-rote questions of the artwork world (what’s an artwork gallery? What are the potentials of image-making?) with out falling into self-congratulatory didacticism. In these restagings, the objects curiously sit between a number of worlds: first dispossessed, then iconic, lastly simply commodity. By reproducing the aesthetic of vogue catalogues and luxury-deco magazines, Bastard each makes enjoyable of our curious fetishistic accumulation of stuff, whereas additionally lingering on the seductive high quality of such photographs. Then Bonne Journée lastly turns again to query itself: is the movie an object or a product?
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