EDOC 2019 Overview

Festival:
The 18th EDOC – Encuentros del Otro Cine

Dates:
May 8-19

About:
Nearly 60 new doc features screen in Quito, Guayaquil, and Cotacachi.

Ecuador is the focus of the How We Are Seen, How We See You section, which offers: Patrice Raynal’s THE BEACHES OF ESMERALDAS, which explores Carnival and the experience of Ecuadorians of African descent; Gabriel Páez Hernández’s SACACHÚN, a portrait of a vanishing town and its inhabitants’ memories of a better time; Eduardo Fabio Henríquez Mendoza’s CRISZAMVER, about a one-man band self-taught street filmmaker/performer; Pocho Álvarez’s GARTELMANN MEMORY, which revisits the ethnographic work of the German filmmaker in 1970s Ecuador; Daysi Burbano H’s MOTHER MOON, about Latin American mothers separated from their children in Italy; and Darío Aguirre’s IN THE COUNTRY OF MY CHILDREN, which details the bureaucracy faced by the filmmaker as he relocated to Germany to be with his partner.

Environmental sidebar The Earth Burns: Panorama includes work such as: Federico Atehortúa Arteaga’s PYROTECHNICS, which explores how visual culture has informed the filmmaker’s perception of Colombia; Patricio Suárez’s MAN ON THE PLAIN, following a 73-year-old as he returns to his native Argentina to work the fields; Stéphane Göel’s ISLEÑOS, an exploration of the legacy of a Swiss governor of a failed Chilean island utopia; Aya Koretzky’s AROUND THE WORLD WHEN YOU WERE 30 YEARS OLD, a portrait of the director’s father, who moved from Japan to Portugal forty years ago; Pedro Ruiz’s HAVANA, FROM ON HIGH, about a makeshift community in Cuba; and Julio López’s THE BATTLE OF THE VOLCANO, a reflection on El Salvador’s civil war by its survivors.

Among the fest’s other sections are Power, Change, and Conflict, with Douglas Duarte’s EXCELLENT, on the plot against Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff; and Margarita Martínez’s THE NEGOTIATION, about the peace process between the Colombian government and guerrilla group FARC; Bodies of Difference, with Rafael Polar’s MISS AMAZONAS, about a transgender beauty pageant in the Amazon rainforest; Family Self Portrait, with Iair Said’s FLORA IS NOT A SONG TO LIFE, an antagonistic portrait of the filmmaker’s great aunt; and Tonalities, with Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva’s THE FIRST MOVEMENT OF THE IMMOBILE, an investigation into the filmmaker’s ancestor, an eccentric composer.