We're very excited to be exclusively presenting the online premiere of Filipino filmmaker Raya Martin's delirious, flagrantly experimental, lovingly conceived and inventively spun feature from 2011, Buenas noches, España.
In another lifetime, a Spanish couple takes drugs and teleports through their television set. A troubled young man travels through the countryside and meets a lost woman. During the trip, they discover a museum housing the expatriated paintings of the most important Filipino artist of the revolution. Eventually, the Spanish couple disappears toward their colony. Inspired by one of the earliest teleportation accounts, which happened between the Philippines and Mexico during the colonial period.
Trailer:
Last year the Museum of the Moving Image in New York organized a retrospective dedicated to Martin, and their online publication, Moving Image Source, has published two great articles on the filmmaker by Phil Coldiron:
- An overview of Raya Martin's career, The First Impulse:
"Raya Martin is one of cinema's great hopes against this blind movement forward [by multinational corporate-industrialist Hollywood]. In the eight years since he began his career, he's made nearly 20 films of a wide variety of lengths and styles, united only by a consistent concern with diving, stumbling, or running back into the past... How can cinema be dying, or dead, when one of the great directors in the world hasn't even hit 30 yet?"
- An appreciation of Buenas noches, España, The Fallen:
"...a portrait of two people in love that looks and feels more like actual love than any relationship Hollywood has managed to put together so far this century."
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Adrian Mendizabal on the Notebook provided his own overview during the retrospective, Raya Martin and His Visions of Postcolonial Realities:
"Raya Martin’s multiplicity as a key filmmaker in experimental cinema in the Philippines remains a complex subject to undertake. His radical and polarizing films earned him not only a reputation as a visionary of the film form, but also a mask of an aesthete, an art-for-art’s sake director detached from the social paradigm of Philippine cinema. These assertions led me to reassess Raya Martin’s career path to look into his films in terms of his varied style, his appropriations as a result of his post-colonial inquiries; and to position him within the ideological paradigm of Philippine cinema."
Interview:
Italian critic and filmmaker Michael Guarneri brings us an interview with Martin which is a film in its own right. Shot during the 2011 film festival in Locarno, it applies Martin's own invention of "autohysteria" to the interview situation with a split screen, which critically comments on itself with puns and doodles. Martin talks about his own films, about other films (The Blair Witch Project', Cloverfield, J.J. Abrams), and about the director's role as an archivist as opposed to a historian, and about turning (film) history against oneself. And it is both informative and incredibly funny.
Séparation de la critique - A trip with Raya Martin (2012)
by Michael Guarneri @BZONE Video di Roberto Bonisoli
CPH:DOX 2012 - Maximalism
Poster:
