Joaquim Jordà Residencies. First Open Call 2022–2023

Number of artists-in-residence: 2
Call dates: 12 October – 12 November 2022
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía, FIDMarseille y Doclisboa
Call dates: 12 October – 12 November 2022

The Museo Reina Sofía, FIDMarseille and Doclisboa present a new annual residencies programme aimed at film-makers and artists working in the field of the essay film, experimental cinema, and, essentially, all manifestations that shape non-fictional film. This joint residency, organised by a museum and two international film festivals, affords an opportunity to articulate different phases between the idea and the realisation of audiovisual work. Furthermore, the programme aims to support the conception, development and production of film projects in the sphere of non-fictional film, funding their execution and creating international networks of debate.

The programme pays homage to Joaquim Jordà (1935–2006), a film-maker whose work was both original and emblematic in the realm of non-fiction and with an arc that spanned the three countries of the institutions organising this residency. For instance, Jordà was honoured with Spain’s National Cinematography Award (2006), with his work a part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection; the last retrospective at the end of his life was at FIDMarseille, in France (2006); and one of his early films, Portogallo, paese tranquilo (1969), centred on resistance against the dictatorship in Portugal. Jordà traced a non-conformist and committed path in creative documentary, characterised by the use of theatre strategies and the mise en scène of profoundly experimental narratives which this open call looks to retrieve and establish as a genealogy of contemporary non-fiction film.

The residency puts forward three stages comprising the research and development of the project and its production and circulation, and will take place in Madrid, Marseille and Lisbon.

The beneficiaries, two per year, will automatically be invited to participate at FIDLab and Doclisboa. FIDLab is a platform of international co-production which is held while FIDMarseille takes place in early July and presents different projects up for funding and distribution. The projects awarded this Residency will be automatically evaluated by a FIDLab independent panel, and even if they are not included among the selected projects, they will still encounter professional opportunities offered by the platform.

Doclisboa, meanwhile, offers artists-in-residence contacts among guests at the festival, held in Lisbon in the second fortnight of October, offering them the chance to build connections with international networks of film-makers, artists and producers.

Residents

Leandro Listorti (Argentina, 1976) investigates film’s past from the material memory of the medium, from film archives to family movies. An underlying theme in Listorti’s research is a questioning of how film has represented nature, a relationship which looks to move beyond modernity’s language of domination and control. In his project for this residency, he approaches scientific cinema in the Antarctic and seeks to trace a counter-history of film via an intuitive and sensitive relationship to nature, landscape and territory.

Elise Florenty (France, 1978) and Marcel Türkowsky (Germany, 1978) explore sociopolitical and historical contexts through the prism of altered states of consciousness, for instance lucid madness, hallucinations and dreams. They expound the multiplicity of the self and its constant transformation, inviting a reflection on the relationship with the other. Their award-winning film project combines anthropological research, poetry and geopolitical critique and explores the origins of the Fouquieria columnaris, a desert tree from Sonora with maligned symbolic meanings in literature (Lewis Carroll) and Indigenous myths (the Comcáac community). The tree represents the end and new dawn of life.