Four Latin American films received awards at the 26th edition of FIDMarseille— one of them winning the highest honor of the festival. Entrelazados / Entangled (pictured left), a Colombian-Italian co-production directed by Italian artist and researcher Riccardo Giacconi, received the Grand Prix of the International Competition. The Georges de Beauregard International Prize was awarded to Santa Teresa & otras historias / Santa Teresa & Other Stories, a Dominican-Mexican-American co-production directed by Nelson de Los Santos Arias.
The Argentinean film Toponimia / Toponimy by Jonathan Perel was awarded with the Camira Prize, while his fellow countryman Daniel Rosenfeld received the Renaud Victor Prize for Al centro de la Tierra / To The Center of The Earth.
During an artist residence in Cali, Colombia, Riccardo Giacconi, the PhD candidate for the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, developed an experimental video documentary in which he explores a quantum physics principle. According to the EPR paradox, if two particles interact in a certain way and then become separated, regardless how distant they are from each other, they will keep sharing information. Thus, Entangled examines the connections between four apparently non-related episodes that supposedly occurred in Cali: the disappearance of a cow; a form of possession caused by a puppet; the fall of a bus into a river due to a lion on the road; and a paradox in quantum mechanics.
Santa Teresa & Other Stories (pictured right), an experimental hour-long docu-fiction directed by Dominican Republic-born Nelson de los Santos Arias, explores the violence of the Mexican-American frontier. The film is a personal adaptation of one of the chapters of 2666, the posthumous novel of the renowned Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, which narrates the investigations surrounding the serial murderers of female workers of factories situated in the border, in the fictitious city of Santa Teresa. As part of the award, a DCP copy of the film will be made—it was originally shot in 16 mm.
As part of the Renaud Victor Prize, To the Center of the Earth, directed by Argentine director Daniel Rosenfeld, was chosen among nine films by a voluntary group of inmates. In the film, a 70-year-old villager, Antonio Zuleta, living in Salta, in the north of Argentina, trains his son in how to make films documenting UFO activity around their home village.
The festival took place in the French city of Marseille between June 30 and July 6.
