Six Latin American films, from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Dominican Republic, will participate in the main competition of the 26th edition of FIDMarseille, which will take place June 30-July 6 in France. The competing films are Al centro de la Tierra / To The Center of The Earth (pictured left) by Daniel Rosenfeld and Toponimia / Toponymy by Jonathan Perel, both from Argentina; Rastreador de estatuas / The Monument Hunter by Jerónimo Rodríguez from Chile; Entrelazado / Entangled by Riccardo Giacconi a coproduction from Colombia/Italy; and Retratos de identificaçao / Identification Photos by by Anita Leandro from Brazil; and Santa Teresa & otras historias / Saint Teresa & Other Stories by Nelson de los Santos Arias, a Dominican-Mexican-American co-production.
In To The Center of The Earth, a loving father-son relationship drama by Rosenfeld, in which a 70-year-old villager, Antonio, living in Salta, in the north of Argentina, trains his son in how to make films documenting UFO activity around his home village. At the same time, he seeks out confirmation in Buenos Aires from a specialist that the films he has shot of strange lights in the sky could be records of UFOs.
The theme of Intertwining prevails in Entangled (pictured right) by Italian-born director Riccardo Giacconi in various ways: in the intertwined stories told by several characters – a puppeteer, a psychic, a tailor and a scientist, who all happen to live in Cali, Colombia; in the interweaving of images and a sound that makes us hear the usually inaudible; in the connection to quantum physics, in which two particles, however distant, may share information, thus challenging the theory of relativity.
Rodríguez’s documentary essay film The Monument Hunter follows Jorge, a Chilean filmmaker living in New York, who decides to seek a statue of a Portuguese neurologist in a park in Chile, a curious investigation begins in the streets of Santiago, Brooklyn and Lisbon, but also through the history of his native country and his own family memory – for which he tries to fill in the gaps.
Identification Photos directed by Leandro tells the story of four Brazilian former guerrillas get their first glimpse of police identification photos taken after their respective arrests during the military dictatorship. The past resurfaces through the images, and with it comes a story of crimes so far unaccounted for.
Saint Teresa & Other Stories by Dominican director de los Santos evokes the reality of the Mexican border, its violence, its vagueness – by trying to render it as justice. The filmmaker has chosen to adapt, in his own way, a chapter from the renowned unfinished book, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño.
In Perel’s Toponymy (pictured left) -named after the discipline that studies the etymological origin of place names- the filmmaker revisits a series of towns in Argentina that were founded by the military government during the mid-70s to violently repress the local guerrilla insurgence.
