Frío Metal
Since changing its official name from Festival International du Documentaire de Marseille to Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille, FIDMarseille has become a significant premiere-driven industry festival dedicated to the expansive genre of “creative nonfiction” to include experimental, hybrid and essayistic works, often with a political ethos. For its 36th edition, FID reaffirmed its rare outspokenness on Palestine by screening To Gaza (2025) and hosting daily morning screenings of the collective work Some Strings. Through retrospectives of Radu Jude and Chilean duo Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda, the festival also seemed intent on signaling that it is not only political, but provocative. FID hosted the latter’s first ever European retrospective, noting that the filmmakers are rarely programmed outside of South America. For Adriazola and Sepúlveda, this appears, at least partly, by design. Beyond their filmmaking, they run workshops at the Escuela Popular de Cine (Popular Film School) and organize the Festival de Cine Social y Antisocial (FECISO), which resists the traditional urban, middle-class gaze that dominates cinephilia by foregrounding cinema for marginal communities.
My favorite film of the festival was their most recent work Cuadro Negro (2025) which won the Grand Prix at the Punta del Vista Festival earlier this year from a jury including FID’s artistic director Cyril Neyrat. So deadpan it is often unclear whether we’re watching an observational doc or bone-dry satire, this confounding docu-fiction follows “artistic” documentarian Sofía (Sofía Gómez) as she ventures with her camera and tripod into the grounds of the Chilean army—specifically, its titular equestrian acrobatic unit.
Mostly shooting on a low-res handheld digital camera, Adriazola and Sepúlveda’s rough-and-ready images are antithetical to the pageantry on display. Men and their steeds galloping past snowy mountains are stripped of their mythical quality as Sofía belligerently directs the soldiers into awkward tableaus, arms lifted feebly as their horses squirm against them. The project reportedly grew out of the directors’ fascination with horses, which led them to frequent equestrian circles that—unsurprisingly—turned out to be havens for Pinochet-worshipping nationalists. The uneasy entanglement between aesthetics and nationalism is laid bare: the ornamental function of the army’s cavalry and movie-making both rely on a choreography of order and performed dominance.
Sofía is at times comically cruel, as when she orchestrates a bizarre re-enactment of the legendary cavalry officer Alberto Larraguibel Morales setting the world high-jump record on horseback in 1949. She instructs a female soldier to mimic Larraguibel’s pose atop a metal statue mounted on the back of a slow-moving truck (decorated with a skull and cross-bones insignia, a symbol of the Prussian Hussars adopted by the Nazis). Forced into a half-mount position for hours, the soldier’s teary-eyed expression is caught in a dim close-up after finally dismounting. Sofía’s ambivalent performance as a director is Nathan Fielder-esque: both aloof and calculating, she toys with the authority she assumes, exposing the eerie willingness of her subjects to submit to spectacle. Adriazola and Sepúlveda’s anarchic experiment pushes Sofía’s see-sawing power dynamics to an absolute extreme. At one point, she inexplicably moves out of her grandmother’s home and moves in with an older woman who literally prays to Pinochet at night. Rather than the expected rupture, we see a maniacal and surprisingly tender bond develop between the women, shaped by mutual distrust.
A fixture at the festival, prolific Mexican director Nicolás Pereda took part in this year’s FidLab with his upcoming project Everything Else is Noise and premiered his latest feature, Cobre (2025), which won the Special Mention. A wry thriller of bureaucracy that started after Pereda learned about the suspicious death of an activist protesting labor conditions in a mining town, Cobre begins as Lázaro (Pereda regular Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez) finds a dead body on his way to work at the mines.
After Lázaro’s discovery, he becomes slowly encumbered by respiratory issues which are met with skepticism by his doctors, boss and aunt Rosa (new collaborator Rosa Estela Juárez, joining a career-long ensemble cast). Pereda does not build a central narrative around the murder mystery, but moves off-center to explore how systemic violence seeps into the inner lives of those on the periphery, juggling tensions between truth, performance and deception around the ambiguous origins of Lázaro’s illness, rumors around the dead body and Lázaro’s involvement, or white workplace lies. The Kafkaesque apex emerges when Rosa waits for a manager to approve her forged signature on a nondescript document to avoid a minor ouroboric workflow delay. Pereda’s static camera lingers on her face; her breathing is shallow and unsteady, her eyes dart around timidly. Trauma is first internalized, then slowly made external through phantom pains, props and repeated gestures. Lázaro’s compulsive fruit consumption, for instance, becomes a strangely sensual intermediary for displaced and unmet desire. Moments of deliberate performance paradoxically mediate moments of truth. When Lázaro sets Rosa up on a date with his creepy older doctor in exchange for a free oxygen tank, Lázaro and his mum role-play the encounter with Rosa, asking her comically pointed questions about the tensions within their own family. While Lázaro and Rosa perform, the camera pans down to linger on their hands touching timidly as a slow, transgressive desire percolates. As always, Pereda turns seemingly banal interactions into sly displays of power.
Winner of the Prix Georges de Beauregard, Clemente Castor’s sophomore feature Frío Metal (2025) builds on his debut Príncipe de Paz (2019), continuing his focus on adrift youth in the Mexico City suburb of Iztapalapa. Trained at the Béla Tarr film.factory in Sarajevo, Castor—like fellow alumnus Kaori Oda—explores a rich dialectic between subterranean spaces and the human body. The result is a highly symbolic, syncretic universe in which bodies collide dizzily with eroded landscapes shaped by human interference. A loose narrative follows two brothers, Mario (Mario Banderas) and Óscar (Oscar Hernández); the former wakes up in a body that is not his, with “images that don’t belong to him,” while Óscar is mostly absent, having escaped from rehab and disappeared from the family. The film’s segments are divided by various game sequences which operate like a secret code accessing alternate cinematic universes. “You will never progress,” a tarot reader tells Mario—an omen followed by a dreamlike encounter with Lázaro (again, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez), who teaches him a complex hand gesture that initiates a spatio-temporal drift between urban ruins and mountainous terrain interspersed with non-fiction vignettes of idle suburban youth.
Castor’s work is often aggressively opaque, guided by a seemingly haphazard editing logic that deliberately short-circuits narrative momentum as the film drifts between non-fiction, epistolary voiceover, gestural performance and the supernatural, staged by a largely non-professional cast. Although I can’t say I understood everything, I felt so surprised by the sensation of being adrift, teleporting between ever-shifting film textures and terrains, from the underground to the skies of what appeared like the edge of the world. The film’s dialectics aren’t strictly ideological but affective: like Mario, I found myself clinging to signs, grasping at symbols, trying to decode meaning from disorder in an almost schizophrenic mode before suspending any desire for formal cohesion. The more Castor tears at the fabric of reality, the more forceful the non-fiction vignettes become. I keep returning to the black-and-white 8mm opening shot: a sour-faced roulette girl spins her wheel at a fairground. Even as she hollers for new players, her face reveals that there are no winners.
Pereda and Castor’s films both engage with the ripple effect of violence born from the extraction of natural resources in their native Mexico with radically different methods. Both filmmakers are less concerned with external representations of struggle than with the internal emotional lives of adrift, working-class individuals, foregoing documentary for a form more fantastical as a means of engaging with the conditions of their collective alienation: one evocatively minimalist; another dizzyingly maximalist.
A real discovery for me was French Competition winner Bonne Journée (2025), made over four years with almost zero budget by visual artist Pauline Bastard, who remains relatively unknown outside France. With a distinctive style rooted in a sustained commitment to recycling, here she upends the format of the durational labor film with something more spritely and camp despite remaining largely dialogue-less. At the Emmaüs centre in Grenoble—a cavernous warehouse charity shop that sells everything from kettles and electronics to statues and clothing—Bastard turns her gaze to the mostly immigrant African workers doing the tedious job of taxonomizing, repairing and displaying the incoming barrage of abandoned objects. Bastard carefully confines us within the warehouse, with shots of the famed Grenoble Alps always out of reach beyond a window, or reflected off of a pair of wide-eyed glasses adorned by one of the workers.
Another canonical French recycling film by Agnès Varda comes to mind, but this more closely resembles Sarah Maldoror’s Un Dessert pour Constance (1981) which considers the ways in which found objects can be re-used for unexpected creative purposes and how the labor of African migrants maintains the pristine appearance of the Republic. At first, Bastard’s static camera observes idling workers sorting through piles of junk—at one point, a six-foot-long shirt continually unfurls until it eclipses the man holding it. When they discover cameras in various cardboard boxes, the workers start using them to stage their own images. A kitschy trio of lamps and a pair of big baby dolls are placed gingerly on glittery fabric; their compatriots model the sartorial pieces with coy, vogue pouts. Bastard playfully renounces any steady authorial position as her own frame is subsumed by her companions’ perspectives as they transform the detritus of 21st-century overproduction into a giant costume-shop and stage.
These chichi portraits are finally displayed in frames and monitors dispersed throughout the shop; shoppers fix their gaze on them with quizzically amused expressions. It’s refreshing to see Bastard delicately reimagine the near-rote questions of the art world (what is an art gallery? What are the potentials of image-making?) without falling into self-congratulatory didacticism. In these restagings, the objects curiously sit between multiple worlds: first dispossessed, then iconic, finally just commodity. By reproducing the aesthetic of fashion catalogues and luxury-deco magazines, Bastard both makes fun of our curious fetishistic accumulation of stuff, while also lingering on the seductive quality of such images. Then Bonne Journée finally turns back to question itself: is the film an object or a product?
