Wiseman, Glodell and Losier Join the 2012 Official Selection

It’s still two months to go until the third edition of the 4+1 Film Festival, but we are already announcing three new titles that will compete in the 2012 Official Selection: the latest work by documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, experimental filmmaker Marie Losier and the multifaceted Evan Glodell. These three films will be screened simultaneously from November 21st through the 25th at the Festival’s venues in Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro, the official headquarters in the festival’s upcoming edition. The Official Selection will also be available for audiences to screen through the Filmin website, the festival’s on-line venue.

Frederick Wiseman has directed about forty feature-length documentaries since he first began making films in the 1960’s. Wiseman’s work is characterized by his direct, patient and meticulously observant style, and he has mainly focused on portraying American institutions in films such as Titicut Follies (1967), High School (1968), Aspen (1991) and Central Park (1991) that have ensconced him as one of the masters of documentary filmmaking. In recent years, Wiseman has also explored Paris in films such as La danse (2009) and in his latest title, Crazy Horse (2011), which we will see in the Official Selection of the 4+1 Film Festival, and which Wiseman shot over the course of the ten weeks he spent immersed in the famous Parisian cabaret in order to show us a detailed new portrait of the people who work there and the venue’s various shows.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, director, producer, actor and screenwriter Evan Glodell has left no one indifferent with his debut feature Bellflower (2011) which has taken part in various festivals including Sundance, SXSW, Sitges and Pusan. The film’s disparate elements combine a love story with a desperate escape in an Apocalyptic setting… Bellflower stands out for its daring photographic aesthetic, achieved using a camera built by Glodell himself out of parts of various old cameras and lenses. This, combined with the very tight production budget has turned it into a sort of cult film.

Lastly, Marie Losier, a French director living in New York, has worked in several different formats on many different experimental works and short films. In her first feature, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which we’ll have the chance to see in the Official Selection, the filmmaker shares the result of over eight-years of following up on the love story between Genesis P-Orridge, founder and alma matter of the seminal industrial group Throbbing Gristle and its spin-off Psychic TV, and his partner Lady Jaye. The couple underwent a process they called “pandrogyny” with the idea of physically becoming the same person in two different bodies.