Good luck, to indie &
to the lovers of
the revolutionary cinema
of this
world

For 17 years we have been wondering what we want to be as an independent film festival. For 17 years the answer seems to have become increasingly clearer. With the country’s latest political upheavals, we have lost our innocence. INDIE has become an adult although it has not reached its maturity yet. If earlier we used to ask ourselves what kind of festival we would like to be, following no established formats, not suffering from the political and economic forces that presented challenges to our existence, today we want to continue what we have already built, as an idea, over time, but without giving up our curatorial freedom or our supposed “statute”, according to which a good festival needs necessarily concepts and good films. A festival such as INDIE reflects about each of its choices because they are the ones that weave the intricacies of our specificity as a festival. We want to be what we are, be the size we are, there is no other intention here than to foster contemporary reflections on cinema through the films, the contents of the films, the directors of the films and the history of cinema. This is our way of doing politics. A festival is in itself a political act; cinema is something that can revolutionize people’s way of thinking, bring them to a more complex world that respects individual and cultural differences while complicating ordinary life to shed light on aesthetic and experimental freedom. Cinema can serve as a liberating experience and open ourselves to infinite possibilities of thought.

Six female filmmakers in
16 films
premieres in Brazil

Sixteen films, never seen in Brazil, determine the curatorship of the World Cinema program. This program reflects the current production of independent filmmaking developed in various parts of the world. It brings the unique voice of six female filmmakers to express what is most audacious and interesting in the contemporary production: in the reflective Colo, the Portuguese Teresa Villaverde uses her experience to create a family collapse caused by an economic crisis; the straightforwardness of the German Angela Schanelec transforms The Dreamed Path into one of the most original films of the year, in term of its narrative form; the French joviality of Léonor Serraille, who has won a Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, presents the freshness of conflicts in Jeune Femme; and the Germanic force of Valeska Grisebach explores, in a humane and powerful way, some current intricate political relations in her third long feature Western. The experimental cinema of the American artist Sharon Lockhart (Rudzienko) and the Portuguese filmmaker Filipa César’s first feature (Spell Reel) are also in INDIE.

The unforgettable and emblematic South Korean director Hong Sang-Soo is at the World program with his most melancholic film, On the Beach at Night Alone, for which Kim Minhee won the Best Actress Award at the Berlinale in 2017. The Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is back at INDIE with Before We Vanish, which premiered at the last Cannes Film Festival with its daring story about an extraterrestrial invasion. Three new directors are on the World program: the South African John Trengove (The Wound), the German Julian Radlmaier (Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog), the Georgian Rati Oneli (City of the Sun) and the Russian Kantemir Balagov (Tesnota), which won the FIPRESCI Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. To close the list, we have selected the most recent features of Damien Manivel (The Park) and of the Chinese Huang Wenhai (We the Workers).

he,
philippe garrel

A retrospective dedicated to the great French filmmaker, post-nouvelle vague, Philippe Garrel is presented in INDIE 2017. Born in 1948, Garrel has personally made the selection of the 22 films he would like to be exhibited at the festival, and chosen the exhibition formats, among 35 mm and DCP; the director has also been personally taking care of the digital restoration of his early works.

#classica,
restored films

For the third consecutive year, we present the Classica program, now a Zeta Filmes’ permanent project, which will exhibit four classics and one cult restored film that will be re-released in Brazilian commercial theaters starting in November. Celebrating 50 years of their release with restored prints in 4k, we will present two important films for the history of the cinema, which are at the same time antagonistic in their style and production: Belle de Jour, the classic of the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, with the dizzying Catherine Deneuve; and a comedy with Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols winner of Best Director Academy Award. The program is completed with Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, Acossado (1960); Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), with Ingrid Bergman, and an undisputed cult by David Lynch: Mulholland Drive (2001).

INDIE FESTIVAL holds its 17th edition in one of the most complex political moments in Brazilian history. Perhaps, from now on, we will have to create a new statute, necessary for a new political paradigm that seems to impose a great setback on the artistic and cultural development of the country. But we will reaffirm our cause: a film festival should serve the art cinema, the independent cinema and the classic films that marked cinema history; it should stimulate the public to see such cinema, and stimulate society to preserve its street and neighborhood theaters, as well as its cultural centers devoted to the cinema. This edition is born mainly from a commitment that we establish with our faithful public. To the public who has always known what to expect from the festival, who has been there ever since the first INDIE in 2001, and to all of us: good luck.

Francesca Azzi
Indie Festival Curator