The 36th edition of the Goya Awards, Spain’s annual celebration of Spanish and Spanish-language cinema presented by the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences and supported by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, has announced its Latin American nominees in the category for Best Ibero-American film. Considered by many to be the Spanish equivalent of the American Academy Awards, the prestigious Goya Awards recognize the best in Spanish and Spanish-language films of the previous year.
The four nominees for the 2022 Goya Awards are The Siamese Bond / Las siamesas by Argentine director Paula Hernández, Los Lobos by Mexican director Samuel Kishi, Song Without a Name / Canción sin nombre by Peruvian director Melina León, and The Cordillera of Dreams / La cordillera de los sueños by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán.
Following Hernández’s critically-acclaimed 2019 feature The Sleepwalkers / Los sonámbulos, The Siamese Bond tells the story of Clota and Stella, mother and daughter. They live alone in an old family house, corseted in a mundane routine. One day, Stella receives news: her father has died and two small apartments in a seaside resort are his inheritance. Stella decides to start a journey to discover this miracle that appears to her as a new and last possibility of becoming independent, but Clota perceives her departure as a terrifying surgical separation. The Siamese Bond won the FLOW Award for Argentine Cinema at the 2020 Mar del Plata International Film Festival.
Winner of the Grand Prix of the International Jury in the competition for Best Film at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival, Kishi’s Los lobos follows Max and Leo, 8 and 5 years old, who are taken from Mexico to Albuquerque (USA) by Lucia, their mother, in search of a better life. While they wait for their mother to return from work, the children explore their new neighborhood inhabited by Latin Americans and Asians, they listen to the stories, rules and English lessons that she leaves for them on an old cassette tape recorder, and they build an imaginary universe with her drawings as they long for their mother to fulfill the promise of taking them to Disneyland.
Peru’s official submission to the 93rd Academy Awards in the International Film competition and based on harrowing true events, Melina León’s debut feature film Song Without a Name tells the story of Georgina, an indigenous Andean woman whose newborn baby is whisked away moments after its birth in a downtown Lima clinic, and never returned. Stonewalled by a byzantine and indifferent legal system, Georgina approaches journalist Pedro Campas, who uncovers a web of fake clinics and abductions, suggesting corruption rotting deep within Peruvian society.
Master Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s The Cordillera of Dreams took home the award for Best Documentary at the 2019 edition of Cannes. The third installment of Guzmán’s trilogy (with Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) that investigated the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in his native Chile, The Cordillera of Dreams focuses on the imposing landscape of the Andes that run the length of the country’s Eastern border, at once isolating and magisterial. In this monlithic documentary, the Cordillera serves as an enigmatic focal point around which Guzmán contemplates the enduring legacy of the 1973 military coup d’état.
This year’s Goya Awards will be held on February 12, 2022 at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia, Spain.
