This year, the 300-page catalog alone is something like pornography for cinephiles, with more than half of those pages devoted to the festival's retrospectives of Robert Bresson, Peter Watkins, Portuguese director Pedro Costa (whose Colossal Youth has been the love-it-or-hate-it cause célèbre of the festival circuit for most of the past year), and the legendary American experimental filmmaker James Benning; a sidebar of classic and contemporary Algerian cinema; a reduced version of MOMA's recent series showing the winners of France's prestigious Jean Vigo Prize; and a selection of rare films from Spain and Russia programmed by the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Richard Peña. In addition, there's something of an unofficial sidebar of films for audiences with Herculean bladders, including Watkins' 14-and-a-half-hour The Journey and Filipino director Lav Diaz's eight-hour Heremías, which comes bearing the alluring subtitle Book 1.
Lest I make the FICCO sound like an orgy of obscuria, I hasten to add that there is plenty in the program of the crowd-pleasing variety, including gala local premières of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book and Todd Field's Little Children, and an open-air screening of The Phantom of the Opera (Chaney, not Schumacher) with live musical accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra. But it is clearly the intent of festival director Paula Astorga Riestra and programming directors Michel Lipkes and Maximiliano Cruz to focus on those movies that most dramatically expand notions of what cinema can be — a mission perhaps best expressed by the festival sidebar called "Trends," which includes the likes of John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century, and Spanish director Albert Serra's inspired minimalist take on the Don Quixote story, Honor de Cavalleria, which, nearly a year after its Cannes première, still seeks a U.S. distributor.
Among new work showing here for the first time, one film sure to create a stir on both sides of the border is director Kieran Fitzgerald's disquieting The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández, which recounts in chilling, unsentimental detail the 1997 shooting death of the titular Mexican-American high-school student by a four-man U.S. Marine border patrol in Redford, Texas. Conceived as something of a companion piece to Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (which proffered a fictionalized version of the Hernández case), Fitzgerald's film is no mere DVD extra. Rather, with its harrowing on-camera testimonials from Hernández's family and friends, as well as three of the four implicated Marines, it offers an urgent contribution to the raging debate over the physical and psychological divides separating the U.S. from its neighbor to the south.
In its fourth year, the FICCO is not without its hang-ups. Staging a festival in a city as sprawling as this is a daunting venture to begin with, and that sheer logistical challenge seems to cause some simple things (like a map of festival venues or an easily referenced schedule of repeat screenings) to be overlooked. One day, I showed up to see Watkins' ultra-rare August Strindberg biopic The Freethinker, only to find that a power failure in the cinema had caused the screening to be canceled. Later that afternoon, I watched half of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Sicilia! projected through the wrong lens (causing either the heads of the actors or the English subtitles to be cut off at all times) before finally giving up and walking out. And when such things happen, the festival staff tends to respond with a shrug and a smile as if to say, "Welcome to Mexico." Yet even with such bumps in the road, the FICCO is an embarrassment of riches at a time when so many film festivals are merely embarrassments.
