There may be some slight bias here, just to say right up front, as Leandro Katz was for a good couple of years (that was when I started taking film classes until he up and retired/quit right before I finished my BA in Film) was one of the professors I most admired, and who helped guide me along and become a better writer and director. That said, when I went to one of his two nights of screenings of works at the Anthology Film Archives, I wasn't sure what to expect (I'd only seen one short of his when I was in school called 'The Visit', a short-film masterpiece I recommend to... anyone who can track it down at WPU, haha).
We got three shorts, the first a silent one-long-take 8mm film tracking along people at a train station with mathematically timed freeze-frames, a 30 minute short doc called 'Paradox' about a banana plantation juxtaposed with statues of ancient ruins in Guatemala. And finally, this film, 'The Day You Love Me', which is one of the best short docs I've ever seen, all concerning a photograph. Katz, like Errol Morris with S.O.P., is inquiring not just about what's in the photograph(s) of this controversial moment in time after Che Guevara was executed and let open for photographers and military personell to look over (though like any good mystery there is that), but about inquiry itself, and what we can learn about ourselves looking at the photograph, and about mystery and so on. It's a powerful, short document (apparently followed up by 'Exhumacion' a film Katz made in 2007 I haven't seen, about Che's body after being missing for 30 years being discovered in Bolivia and taken back to Cuba).
We got three shorts, the first a silent one-long-take 8mm film tracking along people at a train station with mathematically timed freeze-frames, a 30 minute short doc called 'Paradox' about a banana plantation juxtaposed with statues of ancient ruins in Guatemala. And finally, this film, 'The Day You Love Me', which is one of the best short docs I've ever seen, all concerning a photograph. Katz, like Errol Morris with S.O.P., is inquiring not just about what's in the photograph(s) of this controversial moment in time after Che Guevara was executed and let open for photographers and military personell to look over (though like any good mystery there is that), but about inquiry itself, and what we can learn about ourselves looking at the photograph, and about mystery and so on. It's a powerful, short document (apparently followed up by 'Exhumacion' a film Katz made in 2007 I haven't seen, about Che's body after being missing for 30 years being discovered in Bolivia and taken back to Cuba).
