Navajazo by Ricardo Silva
Cinema Tropical and Anthology Film Archives have announced the creation of the new series 'If You Can Screen It There: Premiering Contemporary Latin American Cinema' presenting monthly screenings of remarkable Latin American films making their local premiere, and programmed by Argentinean filmmaker Matías Piñeiro and Cinema Tropical's director Carlos A. Gutiérrez.
New York City, despite its status as a world capital of cinema, regularly misses out on screenings of many key international films. Though the exhibition of Latin American cinema in the city has drastically increased over the past decade, a considerable number of influential movies from the region still fail to premiere locally.
Far from minor works, the films included in this series are by some of the region’s most important filmmakers, have garnered major awards at international festivals, and provide an important window into the often overlooked world of Latin American cinema.
The first three titles in the new series are the Mexican film Navajazo by Ricardo Silva on January 19, the Argentinean film Mauro by Hernán Rosselli on February 16, and the Chilean film Verano by José Luis Torres Leiva on March 23.
Winner of the Golden Leopard for Best Film in the Cineasti del Presente (Filmmakers of the Present) competition at the Locarno Film Festival, Ricardo Silva’s provocative and irreverent debut feature film Navajazo is a quirky fiction-documentary hybrid set in the border city of Tijuana, where a series of peculiar outcasts (a junkie couple, a musician nicknamed “El Muerto,” and an American porn director, among others) struggle to survive in a hostile post-apocalyptic environment filled with drugs, sex, and violence.
"Utterly mesmerizing in its perversion" (James Lattimer, Slant Magazine), Navajazo (which means “knife wound” in Spanish) confirms Silva as a filmmaker to watch, and Tijuana as an unlikely Mexican art scene.
Hernán Rosselli’s auspicious debut feature film Mauro, a winner at the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival (BAFICI), is a sharp character study following Mauro (played by Mauro Martínez), a metalworker who moonlights as a currency forger trading fake bills in the streets of Buenos Aires. He decides to set up a little printing shop with his roommate Luis and Luis’s pregnant girlfriend to produce counterfeit money. Yet things get complicated when he falls for the mysterious Paula.
Verano, the second fiction feature by José Luis Torres Leiva, one of the leading Chilean filmmakers of his generation whose work has had very limited exposure in the U.S. Verano is a choral drama set on a hot summer day in the south of Chile, where small events shape the lives of visitors and employees of an established thermal resort.
A dozen characters experience the long vacation hours in nature – sleeping in the sun, learning how to drive, cleaning the house, kissing for the first time, swimming at night, or just walking and talking, while the day slowly unravels into small fragments of happiness and discovery. The cast includes Argentinean actress/singer Rosario Bléfari (who played the title role in Martín Rejtman’s Silvia Prieto), and Chilean documentary filmmaker Ignacio Agüero.
