New York-based streaming platform Kinoscope has digitally released three feature films by Ecuadorean director Javier Izquierdo: A Secret in the Box / Secreto en la caja (2016), Panama (2019), and Crimes of the Future / Crímenes del futuro (2019), in its international premiere. The three films were launched on April 27 in partnership with the cultural organization VAIVEM.
The mockumentary film A Secret in the Box invents the life and works of Marcelo Chiriboga, a fictional Ecuadorian writer internationally known as a member of the “Latin American Boom” generation, but who remains unknown in his country until this day. Through multiple voices and varied archival footage, the film reconstructs the puzzle of Chiriboga´s existence, a mix of reality and fiction.
In Panama, two Ecuadorian men, two friends from the past, meet coincidentally in a foreign city to find out how much they have changed and all that they share. One is a banker and the other a guerrilla member and both are trapped in their activities. Panama City in the eighties, both a tax haven and a place of political asylum, is the backdrop of this story about friendship and false identities that takes place during 24 hours.
In Crimes of the Future—an Ecuadorean-Norwegian co-production—Izquierdo explores the impact of the 1966 film Hunger (based on the novel by Knut Hamsun), on various generations of Norwegian art practice through a series of conversations. The film is re-utilized in different ways in order to understand the role of the artist in the present and compose a portrait of Oslo (the city where it was shot) from the perspective of a foreign filmmaker.
