10 · 08 · 08

Todd Haynes presents Superstar

Clara Sanchez/Translated by Caroline MacKinnon

[imagen]Last night U.S. filmmaker Todd Haynes, guest of honor at the sixth Morelia International Film Festival, presented a selection of three short films including, as a surprise to the audience, his iconic film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.

Carlos Garza, FICM programming coordinator, introduced the director and said “this is one of the most extraordinary events in the entire festival,” building suspense in the audience for the possibility of seeing the short film about Karen Carpenter.

“Thank you everyone. I just arrived today, it’s my first time here in this beautiful and special place and I can hardly wait to go out and explore this city. This festival has a great reputation and I have many friends who have talked about it. I saw that the programming is fantastic for this year, thanks to our friend Daniela Michel.”

Later, the filmmaker talked about each of the films in the program, “they are three very rare films. Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud, was my thesis project at school. It talks about the myths and art of Rimbaud, you can see how I was influenced by semiotics and film theory; it’s a study on the meanings and interpretations that we have given the poet’s work; more has been written about him than what he actually wrote himself.”

Haynes then said that he felt a bit nervous showing the film called Dottie Gets Spanked. “I made this film for the Independent Television Service about the significance of families on television, drawing from the sketches I did of a child of iconic figures on TV, as well as from Sigmund Freud’s essay “A Child Is Being Beaten” about childhood masochistic fantasies.”

The surprise of the evening was the projection of the film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, “here I wanted to explore a celebrity, their identity and the metaphor around the feminist figure.”

Garza thanked Mara Fortés for the help in making this program possible.