No, but I saw Los Muertos. Frankly I'm torn about this contemplative cinema of which Lisandro Alonso and a lot of other filmmakers are representative. It's like the ideas are more interesting than the film themselves. Like any other trend there are great films and very bad ones I guess. Los Muertos was a case where I was seeing the film waiting for it to earn the kind of stillness and attention that it demanded from me. Haven't seen La Libertad but nothing I've heard about it or that I've seen in Los Muertos tells me it could be any different.
It may be that I am being simplistic but to me there are a lot of filmmakers and films out there that fit this exact mold and I call them "the slow ones". There have been some slow movies in this vein I've loved from the last decade: Reygadas's Silent Light, the Gus van Sant trilogy of death (specially Gerry), Amat Escalante's Los Bastardos, Lucrecia Martell's La Cienaga. I mildly enjoyed Tropical Malady and I guess Los Muertos too. I can say I even enjoyed those more than the films by Kiarostami that influenced them. Yet there are some really exasperating movies out there from the same school, like Jarmusch's Limits of Control, and there was another one I saw called Clouds of May. Reygadas's Battle in Heaven was hell on earth actually, and Lake Tahoe. I have a special noticing of these movies because there is a substantial movement in Mexico and latinamerica of young filmmakers doing this kind of thing, but it almost always sucks because they don't seem to know why they're doing it except being contrarian to the usual narrative formula, and the results are pretty empty or tiresome.
About the list, it's refreshing in a way to see different titles...
