The Triptych of Mondongo review – one part art documentary, two parts directorial megalomania

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What begins as a portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo snowballs into Mariano Llinás’s infuriatingly brilliant farrago of colour, conflict and existential crisis About as inside-baseball for visual arts as you can get, Mariano Llinás’s three-part portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo is knackering, infuriating and, infuriatingly, often brilliant – especially in its more sincere second instalment. The film nominally tries to document Mondongo’s 2021 Baptistery of Colours project , in which the artists catalogued the chromatic spectrum with plasticine blocks inside a dodecahedron chapel. But it quickly snowballs into Llinás’s own scattershot inquiry into colour and portraiture, a tone poem that ceaselessly interrogates its own tones, a crisis of faith about representation, and – as he falls out with artists Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha – a droll depiction of a director’s nervous breakdown. As Laffitte lets fly at him at one point, Llinás can never resist the...
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Speak So I Can See You review – tuning in to a radio station’s soul

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Documentary portrait of Radio Belgrade, one of Europe’s oldest broadcasters, threads together its scenes without commentary to hypnotic effect

The title is borrowed from Socrates, and signals the high-minded way of this oddly hypnotic documentary stroll through the corridors of Radio Belgrade. There is no voiceover, no talking heads, nothing to tell you that it is one of Europe’s oldest radio stations and a much-valued repository of culture and debate, or any other salient facts. But watching the public broadcaster’s technicians at work, listening to the stream of philosophical and political voiceovers is akin to hacking into a live transmission of the soul of a Balkan cultural institution.

Director Marija Stojnic opts for a completely freeform approach, collaging archival monologues over shots of presenters at work, techies setting up mics and adjusting oscillators, an orchestra making a tentative recording, a group photo session. Often, no one is there at all, and history seems to haunt these corridors and archives, impassively shot by cinematographer Dusan Grubin.

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