Ainhoa Rodríguez, which is world-premiering in the Tiger Competition of the 50
thInternational Film Festival Rotterdam, is one of the most suggestive and beautiful that this writer can remember of late. It shows an illustrated female figure holding a cigarette in one hand and a traditional sweet from Extremadura in the other, while a cage with a single flame burning inside it emerges from the top of her open head. It would be impossible to come up with a better suggestion of the nuances of this movie than this illustration (which is the work of
Santiago Cubides and
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Santa Monica s revered Highways Performance Space presents Film Maudit 2.0, a truly unusual selection of feature, short and experimental films, some that blend performance and cinema, and others with decidedly queer themes.
Named after gay art film director/artist Jean Cocteau s term for his 1949 festival of Cursed Films, the second annual festival spans a wide range of narrative styles and streams January 12-24. The festival is free with registration.
With 125 works of cinema from 25 countries including films rarely if ever seen in festivals, the selected works address sociopolitical issues and taboo subject matters that challenge conventional artistic assumptions and sexual mores.