Billy Bragg & Wilco: Man in the Sand

A Boy Named Sue chronicles the transformation of a transsexual named Theo from a woman to a man over the course of six years. Following Theo's physiological and psychological changes during the process, as well as their effects on his lesbian lover and community of close friends, A Boy Named Sue tells a story about gender identity, relationships, and how even things that seem permanent can change.

María is an Amorúa girl; an indigenous group that traveled the savannas of Orinoquía as nomads. She lives with her grandmother Matilde, her sister diana and her cousins in Puerto Carreño, in the Colombia-Venezuela border. The amorúa are considered wild and are not literate. Matilde wants her granddaughters to learn to write and read to live better in this town of "rational whites" as they call us. The director follows María's life for 8 years from her childhood to her adolescence and invites her to travel the places her grandma did as a nomad.

After casting painter and video artist Mania Akbari as the central figure of his groundbreaking Ten (2002), and then witnessing her outstanding debut as a feature film director in 20 Fingers (2004), Abbas Kiarostami urged her to direct a sequel to the film. In Dah be alaveh Chahar (10 + 4), though, circumstances are different: Mania is fighting cancer. She has undergone surgery; she has lost her hair following chemotherapy and no longer wears the compulsory headscarf; and sometimes she is too weak to drive. So the camera follows her to record conversations with friends and family in different spaces, from the gondola she had famously used in her first feature to a hospital bed.

Over twenty years, the Russian documentary filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya interviewed pioneers of American documentaries, such as Richard Leacock, Robert and Anne Drew, Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker, Jonas Mekas, among others. In long conversations, they discuss the elaboration of titles that are now fundamental to the genre’s world history, commenting on the introduction of new light and portable cameras that allowed the advent of Cinema Verite, in addition to sharing the fundamentals and principles of the art of capturing life. The sum of these parts corresponds to a singular opportunity of re-encounter with the thinking of these masters, even those that have already passed away.

For Barbara Figueroa