DN film premieres at IDFA International Film Festival Amsterdam
The graduation film Letter from Eusapia directed by Andrés Cornejo Pinto, a DN student from Ecuador, will have its European Premiere in competition at the 34th edition of IDFA - International Documentary Film Festival, the largest documentary festival worldwide which this year is back to the cinema theatres of Amsterdam from 17 to 28 November.
Two more films directed by DN alumni after their graduation were selected to IDFA as well.
Last Days at Sea, by Venice Atienza and Fan Wu, two alumni from DocNomads, is a feature documentary previously developed with support of IDFA Bertha Fund, which will be presented in IDFA’s section Best of Fests where will be also screened Constrain, a short film co-direct by Antoine Fontaine, a DocNomads alumnus.
In IDFA’s International Competition is premiering the feature Where Are we Headed, by Ruslan Fedotow, a current student in DocNomads.
By Andrés Cornejo Pinto (Ecuador) • 19’ • 2021
Synopsis:
Filmmaker Andres Cornejo Pinto sends cameras through the sewers of Brussels. He mainly records sewage and rats, but he mixes this report of his everyday work with a story about the underground city of Eusapia, illustrated by archive footage. During the Cold War, it was said to have stored artworks. But a simultaneous experiment with mushroom cultivation proved fatal for some of the artistic treasures.
While the filmmaker explores the depths of Brussels with robotic cameras, his father in Ecuador similarly explores the innermost parts of the human body as he performs advanced keyhole surgery. However, the surgeon is powerless when a virus emerges for which there is no cure, and patients—including his own sister—die en masse in the hospital.
Father and son are connected by telephone, bridging the distance between continents, and between the pseudo-mythological Eusapia in decline and the current Covid-19 pandemic. Existential questions about life, death, and “being at home” hang heavy in the air.
In IDFA catalogue