The Argentinian filmmaker Leandro Listorti works in the fringes of archive footage and experimental practices. Presenting a full showcase of his solo directorial work, DAFilms highlights a filmmaker whose films combine fascination with film material, passage of time, and the position of humans within the natural world.
Listorti’s practice as an archivist and programmer shows in his filmmaking through the obvious love for the moving image; both as the raw material with its variety of aesthetic textures, and as a medium allowing for endless possibilities of meaning-making. He explores these qualities playfully, but systematically; such as in his recent feature Herbaria (2022), which interlaces the world of plants and cinema by juxtaposing the parallels between their life cycles and preservation efforts. Inspired by the herbarium, Listorti uproots and replants the footage, bringing to our attention its beauty and perseverance. He does this mostly non-verbally, through contrasting sounds and images, allowing the words to have a piercing impact and space for contemplation of the cinema-as-nature connections - such as in the casual conversation with the late great Argentinian experimental filmmaker, Narcisa Hirsch, talking about her love of flowers, but also of the implications or their absence.
Such practices can be found throughout Listorti’s oeuvre. In The Endless Film (2018), he repurposes excerpts from Argentinian films that were never finished, creating a testament of both the practice of cinema-making, but also documenting the universality of human emotions and infinite possibilities of creativity.
In his first feature, Dead Youth (2009), Listorti uses cinema as a tool to explore the life/death cycle of both people and the environments they inhabit, allured by a region with a suspiciously high rate of teenage suicide.
The two short films presented in this program, Fresno (2014) and Petit Daguerre (2018), show how interplays of human and natural worlds can be approached playfully in the short format.
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