Melisa Liebenthal

Las Lindas

Melisa Liebenthal

Melisa Liebenthal

From her own personal experience and from talking with her lifelong friends, Melisa (24) wonders about the mandates and prohibitions that mold the cultural construction of the female gender, especially in relation to the image. With humor and candidness, the film portraits a feminine world seen from the inside, from conversations, personal photos and home movies.

Constanza

Melisa Liebenthal

Constanza is 35 years old, she works as a housemaid at Irene’s house, a 65 year old woman who is temporarily in a wheelchair. The film focuses on Constanza’s meticulous and almost obsessive gestures. As the hours pass by, repetition and melancholy become increasingly heavy, until this apparently ordinary day cracks.

Dancing in the Street, 11 grados de separación

Letícia Simões, Alessandro Focareta

After having shared a common experience in Cuba, twelve filmmakers say goodbye to return to their countries and make a pact: to make a collective film that answers the questions: what does it mean to plagiarize images and how to do it in the distance? The mechanism is unusual: a director makes a short and sends it to the next director, who in turn makes his own short for the purpose of plagiarizing the one he received. And so the chain of plagiarism continues until it reaches the last one. Each one interprets in their own way what it means to plagiarize the received film. The first link in the chain is James Benning, one of the world's most patient filmmakers. His extensive plans are replicated in the following fragments. Disobedience moves the exercise away from literality and an exploration of the texture of the images begins. In its repetitive mechanism, we can see that cinema is, in addition to record of reality, an art of images and sound. (Santiago González Cragnolino)

Aquí y Allá

Melisa Liebenthal

Melisa Liebenthal

Aquí y allá is an essay film that studies what being at home means. The filmmaker uses photographs, maps and Google Earth to connect places around the globe; not just from her own past, but also from the complex migratory history of her family that stretches back to Hitler-era Germany and Mao's China. Reality and the virtual prove equally confusing: however much you zoom in, you never get closer to home.