The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the lineup for the 15th edition of Latinbeat, their annual showcase spotlighting contemporary cinema from Latin America. Brazilian film Casa Grande (pictured), the fiction debut feature by Fellipe Barbosa' will be the opening night selection for the series which will feature 16 films and will take place July 11-20 in New York City.
Set in Rio, Casa Grande is a portrait of a teenager who strives to transcend the limitations of his upper-middle-class family life. Latinbeat will also feature films from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominica Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
"Fifteen years after the reawakening of Latin American cinema in the 1990s there is greater and more varied film production, more interconnectedness among national cinemas, more organized governmental funding, more young people studying film, and more film festivals in the region," said Latinbeat programmer Marcela Goglio, quoted in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's blog. "However, it is exciting to see that the formal exploration and sense of urgency of those early films persists in the works of many new directors today, giving the region a sense of perpetual cinematic rebirth."
Other highlights include All About the Feathers / Por las plumas, the directorial debut by Costa Rican filmmaker Neto Villalobos; Cristo Rey, a Dominican contemporary take on Romeo in Juliet directed by Leticia Tonos Paniagua; Cartagena winner's Dust on the Tongue / Tierra en la lengua by Rubén Mendoza and Mateo by María Gamboa.
Brazil will also be represented by Brazilian filmmaking duo Marcelo Gomes and Cao Guimarães with O homem das multidões / The Man of the Crowd, based on an Edgar Allan Poe tale. From Argentina, the series will feature Matías Lucchesi's coming-of-age story Ciencias naturales / Natural Sciences and Rodrigo Moreno's poignant Reimon. Mexican films Paradise / Paraíso by Mariana Chenillo, The Searches / Las búsquedas by Jose Luis Valle, and We Are Mari Pepa / Somos Mari Pepa by Samuel Kishi round up the program.
Click here to see the full lineup.
