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STORIES OF RAW, POETIC WOMEN IN TWILIGHT PORTRAIT AND HISTORIAS
05/09/2011
One of the most powerful films of the Venice Days is the fruit of a collaboration between two women, Twilight Portrait by Russia’s Angelina Nikonova, and also the product of a completely female venture is one of the most poetic films, Franco-Brazilian Historias, the first work by video artist Julia Murat.
The first, co-written by director and the actress Olga Dihovichnaya - who preferred not to go on stage to meet the audience - is the portrait of an inhospitable Russia in which indifference, moral degradation and violence reign. It is against this backdrop that a bitter and unconventional relationship is played out between a social worker who is having an existential crisis and a none-too respectable policeman.
"The film’s initial idea was Olga’s," Nikonova explains, "she did the first draft of the screenplay, bringing her studies in psychology to bear, then we re-adapted it together. The inspiration was life: everything that is told happened to us, to friends or acquaintances." The use of natural lights and no make-up for Olga lend the film an air of authenticity, as does the low budget, which forced the director to shoot with two digital cameras, filming simultaneously from different angles.
In a totally different genre, and taking place in a much calmer context, Historias. Here, the very young Brazilian director Murat recounts - in a contemplative, aesthetic style, with few words but many images - the meeting of two women: one very old (the delicate Sonia Guedes), who lives in a village in the middle of nowhere in Brazil, with only memories of her long-lost husband, waiting for death; the other is a young and sensitive photographer (Lisa E. Favero), who comes across this ghostly town purely by chance and, while she takes her shots of this lost world, she changes its rhythms. Part documentary, part fairytale.
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