Deep in the forest a group of five friends wander around like a lion herd. Lost in their word games, they play and seduce each other while going back and forth into adulthood territory, in a desperate search to avoid their already written story.

LEONES is a fairy tale drawn in sinuous, long Steadicam takes which call to mind similar hypnotic camerawork in films by Michaelangelo Antoioni or Max Ophuls. Widely celebrated on the festival circuit, the film curiously never received proper distribution in the United States despite López’s preternatural command of mood and image, and copies have become hard to track down in the ensuing decade. Ten years later, the spontaneity of its teenage performers and its insinuating psychological texture have become unforgettable. Inspired by both avant-garde literature and real-life grief, López depicts youthful listlessness as a kind of festering, with the characters’ disjointed conversations rarely lining up in an equal exchange. LEONES is a work of pure cinema – surreal, melancholy, macabre, impossible to pin down but never obscure for its own sake.

IF I WERE THE WINTER ITSELF
(SI YO FUERA EL INVIERNO MISMO)
dir. Jazmín López, 2020
92 mins. Argentina.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 12 – 7:30 PM with Jazmín López in person for Q+A moderated by Josh Siegel
(This event is $10.)
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 30 – 10 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS! 

Four friends meet on a remote estate to create a cinematic re-enactment of three iconic works that embodied the social and artistic revolution of 50 years ago.

López’s second feature tackles its artistic influences head-on (specifically, works by Harun Farocki, Ana Mendieta and Jean-Luc Godard) while expanding on the uncanny assurance of filmmaking demonstrated in LEONES. Like that film, SI YO FUERA EL INVIERNO MISMO is an odyssey traversing the physical world and an unknowable afterlife, but López’ signature operatic themes are undercut by the film’s sly sense of humor and an unerring eye for tedium – not just of collectively workshopped art/performance, but also of heartbreak and grief.

Special thanks to Scott Macauley (Forensic Films), Mitchell Mailloux Glidden and Ilyse Singer (Roxy Tribeca).

JAZMIN LOPEZ is a filmmaker, visual artist, and a professor. She graduated from the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires. She has also an MFA in Visual Arts from NYU and MFA in Visual Arts from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. She participated in the WhitneyISP. Her work is represented by Ruth Benzacar gallery and has been featured in venues like Fondation Pernod Ricard, San Jose Museum, OCAT, Tabacalera, Kadist, Istanbul Biennial and KW. She works as professor for NYU and as an assistant professor of Boris Groys. 

JOSH SIEGEL is a Curator of Film at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He has organized more than 150 film, media, and gallery exhibitions, many of which have appeared on Best of the Year lists in the New York Times, Artforum, Film Comment, Cahiers du cinéma, and the New Yorker. He serves on the selection committees of the annual festivals New Directors/New Films and Doc Fortnight, and he is the founding director of To Save and Project: The MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation, now in its 20th edition. He serves on the executive boards of MacDowell (as well as its nominating, admissions, and DEAI committees), Light Industry, Cinema Tropical, and the Maurice Sendak Foundation.

ANTHONY CHASSI is a writer and curator based out of Queens, NY. His writing has been featured in Hyperallergic, Film Comment and Screen Slate; his curating has been featured at Spectacle as well as at the Lenfest Center for the Arts at Columbia University.