Words and Music: Two New Films by Ted Fendt and Nicolás Pereda
Our coverage of FID Marseille continues with reviews of new (to InRO) films by Ted Fendt and Nicolás Pereda -- festival darlings whose interest in language and music, respectively, take center stage.
Foreign Travel - Ted Fendt
Like few other working filmmakers, Ted Fendt has created for himself a functioning cinematic universe, full of characters seeking creative and intellectual stimulation and answers about how to move through life, captured in precise but unfussy compositions shot on velvety 16mm. It might be easy to dismiss Fendt’s films, with their delicate, sober whiffs of Rohmer and Straub-Huillet, as navel-gazing intellectual exercises — if only his latest, Foreign Travel, weren’t a total repudiation of that charge.
Foreign Travel follows Leonie (Leonie Rodrian), a woman living in and around the Chamissoplatz area of Berlin, who immerses herself in the obscure novels of Italian author Anna Maria Ortese over the course of a year. In between regular book club readings, she casually sees her friends in their apartments, in cafes, or by surprise on the streets of the famous square’s 19th century architecture — miraculously untouched by WW2 — where the niggles of contemporary life, both big and small, begin to worm their way into Leonie’s individual pursuit of truth within Ortese’s books.
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