Art of the Real is Film at Lincoln Center’s annual showcase of documentary and hybrid movies.
Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the 7th Art of the Real documentary film festival is screening virtually at filmlinc.org from November 13-26, 2020. More than 25 films are available for screening in the United States.
7th Art of the Real 2020 Documentary Film Festival
This year’s festival highlights the trailblazing masterworks of numerous Latin American filmmakers and artists such as Eloisa Soláas’s “The Faculties” 🇦🇷, which reflects on the state of education in Argentina through the experiences of 12 students preparing for final exams, Ezequiel Yanco’s “La Vida en común” 🇦🇷, about an Indigenous community’s allegorical battle with a quasi-mythical beast or Kaori Oda’s “Cenote” 🇲🇽 which explores the mystical energies of natural formations on the Yucatan Peninsula.
The lineup also features Jonathan Perel’s “Corporate Accountability,” 🇦🇷 which looks back at companies’ roles in brutally quashing worker organizations during Argentina’s military dictatorship or “Ignacio Agüero’s I Never Climbed the Provincia” 🇨🇱 which collects the forgotten microhistories of the filmmaker’s neighborhood in Santiago, Chile.
There are a few free talks also. As you can see Film at Lincoln Center has some strong Argentine 🇦🇷 programmers.
Follow Your Own Light
We are living in interesting times when our health, work, social justice and politics are all broken. But as the Persian poet Rumi famously said, “the wound is the place where the light gets in.”
Filmmaking is storytelling with light. If you ever wanted to be a filmmaker, now is the time to begin.
Our Indigenous, Black and Latin communities are suffering more than others. As hard as it is to live with death and uncertainty, our social wounds are creating new opportunities for people of color.
As soon as the COVID-19 pandemic wanes, all this light is going to burst forth in an explosion of creativity. The Roaring Twenties began with the end of the 1918-20 Spanish Flu Pandemic. It’s going to happen again and New York City will again be the epicenter of all this light.
The Art of the Real documentary film festival is a great opportunity for you to see sharp new work and interact with filmmakers. That’s how you start. You hang around with artists who are more developed than you. Follow your own light and by doing so, you just might help others to see.
Save 20% on Art of the Real Tickets
Individual films are $10. There is a $50 All-Access Pass. That’s a good deal.
Film at Lincoln Center sponsored this by offering our readers a 20% discount with promo code AOTR20.
Cenote
We chose the cover image from Kaori Oda’s “Cenote” about the Limestone sinkhole pools in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. The Yucatan is Mayan country. In Indigenous Mayan tradition, these strikingly beautiful pools were believed to be portals between the worlds of the living and the dead.
We have cenotes in the Dominican Republic too. They are sacred Indigenous Taíno places. On a separate note, we recently learned that there was contact between the Mayans of Mexico and Guatemala and the Taínos of Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and the Bahamas. In the Colonial Era, the Taíno called the Mayans to come and help fight the colonizers. We have Mayan ball courts in Puerto Rico.
We don’t know the intention, but Oda’s image of a woman floating in the cenote is a poetic metaphor for how many of us feel right now. The ground has been pulled out from beneath our feet and we are floating in uncertainty, somewhere between life and death.
Perhaps we need to take a page from Mayan cosmology and lose our fear of death. Mayans believed death was reality and life was but a dream. When you look at it like that, you can overcome the paralysis of confusion and start to swim through life again.
