2018 New Horizons IFF Dailies: Perspective is Everything | Day 3 of IONCINEMA in Wroclaw
The OP ENHEIM festival space is today’s discovery at Nowe Horyzonty. This recently renovated seven-storey building, so narrow that you might be forgiven for missing it entirely (as I did twice, of course, before noticing the little festival sign next to the door), is located on the ultra-central Plac Solny in Old Town.
I’m still fuzzy on the details, but I enjoyed the pop-up futsal tournament that had taken over the square today, complete with giant-sized scoreboard, crowded stands and such nail-biting clashes as Kirgistan vs. Austria. Surrounded by basically only restaurants and bars – my afternoon search for a tech store yielded no results whatsoever – the OP ENHEIM building dates back to the 13th century and it’s now been converted into a space for artists. In the meantime, it houses some of the festival’s staff and provides a stunning backdrop for interviews. 
It’s here that I met Joe Penna for a lovely chat about Arctic. I’ve seen the film twice now, and I continue to appreciate its simplicity and procedural discipline, no doubt a byproduct of Penna’s (and his peers’) background as Youtube creators (check out his channel here), which means that the ‘craft for craft’s sake’ mantra is taken to levels unthinkable even for those who lived through post-modernism. Penna has a warm, gentle personality and clear filmmaking ideas. You would think him vulnerable to a certain gimmicky approach to visual storytelling, but so far he has avoided that, too.
Another filmmaker who does quite a lot of successful avoiding is Jaime Rosales, whose Petra screened today at Nowe Horyzonty after premiering at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. Rosales’ style lulls you into thinking this family drama has only so many turns in it, and that it’s being unnecessarily precious about it. I certainly had all but given up on it, letting the film shuffle endlessly its non-chronological deck of cards with limited hopes (I was already satisfied with yet another memorable performance by Barbara Lennie). And yet, one implausible reveal at a time, it doubles down on itself with an understated self-confidence that it’s difficult not to admire. Gutta cavat lapidem, and Rosales has definitely pierced this rock of patriarchal vileness.
