A Tribute to FIFA: The International Festival of Films on Art Hits Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Tuesday, 11 September 2012 06:06

Written by Laura Blum

For even the most eager festival-goer, swarms of characters caught up in plots can cause vertigo. As if to shore up public immunity, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is prescribing A Tribute to FIFA: The International Festival of Films on Art (September 19 to 23, 2012) prior to the 50th New York Film Festival (September 28 - October 14).

Detox yourself in four days with real stories about artistic creativity.

The Rx comes from Canada. Since 1981, Montreal has been home to FIFA's annual booster of cinema about art forms as mingled as painting, sculpture, architecture, digital art, design, fashion and photography. Beyond the visual arts, the program additionally
favors films exploring theater, dance and music, among other performing arts. Literature too bobs up among the predominantly documentary fare. Comparing the language of film to that of another expressive medium doesn't get much more literal than this.

The Tribute, also dubbed Eye on The Arts, rounds up nine films shown at the art fest's 30th run. Two of these are encores for recent releases that have garnered interest for their featured subjects: Elizabeth Lennard's The Stein Family: The Making of Modern Art (screened with Bone Wind Fire) and Matthew Springford's Ai Weiwei: Without Fear or Favor.

If Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris brought audiences into the salon of writer Gertrude Stein, The Stein Family takes on not only Gertrude but also her fellow expatriate kin -- et bien sûr Alice B. Toklas -- and their zealotry for avant-garde art. Lennard, herself an artist, highlights Gertrude's special bond with Picasso, her brother Michael's close tie to Matisse and other brother Leo's aesthetic apprenticeship under the critic Bernard Berenson. Flashing the family's considerable collection -- Cezanne, Gauguin, Bonnard and the like -- she demonstrates how their privileged relationships paved modern art's way in Europe and the US.

By the same token, fans of Alison Klayman's Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry can delve deeper into the art and activism of China's outspoken critic through Springford's BBC documentary. The UK director/producer chronicles Ai Weiwei's crusade for artistic freedom by way of his Sunflower Seeds installation at the Tate Modern, an encounter with Korean-born installation artist Nam June Paik and scrapes with the authoritarian regime, among other unblinking investigations.

Yet if ever a film captured the effect of state control on creative production, that film is Unfinished Spaces. Ten years in the making, Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray's ravishing documentary charts the stunted development of an art school complex on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba. Designed by the then upstart architects Roberto Gottardi,
Ricardo Porro and Vittorio Garatti, the National Art Schools rose out of a country club golf course where Fidel Castro was teeing up with Che Guevara and got inspired.

More than 50 years later, the project is still in the works. The troika of now grizzled architects return to the site to reminisce about their revolutionary vision and to help rehabilitate what they were originally given but two months to design. Soon after construction began, politics and economics would soon dash their modernist opus as Cuba tightened its Soviet ties.

Of the buildings for music, dance, theater and visual arts schools, only two were completed. Sunk by ideology and nature, they fell to ruin nearly as dramatic as their cresting, swirling contours.

Unfinished Spaces itself has become an instrument of the facility's revival. Earlier this summer, during the Latin Beat series at FSLC's Walter Reade Theater, the filmmakers conspicuously dodged questions about Castro, who is shown recently championing their renovation. The message was clear: don't imperil this filmed testimony to a long-dampened dream. That testimony is its hope for redemption.

Other FIFA selections are:

 • Bone Wind Fire
 • Eames: The Architect and the        Painter
 • Jiří Kylián: Forgotten Memories
 • Produced by George Martin
 • Revolutions of the Night: The Enigma of Henry      Darger

The full series is detailed here. Jointly presented with Muse Film and Television with backing from Québec's New York representation, it was programmed in collaboration with FIFA founder/director René Rozon and New York Delegate Nadine Covert.

Don't forget to get your art shot.

A Tribute to FIFA: The International Festival of Films on Art
September 19 to 23, 2012
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th Street
New York, NY 10023 

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