Tribeca Film Institute announced yesterday the winner of the 17th edition of the Tribeca All Access grantees program, which features five Latin American grantees from Colombia, Mexico, and Nicaragua, among the selected 14 documentary and scripted films. Each filmmaking production teams will receive $10,000 grants to help with their business needs.
The winners were scheduled to attend the Institute’s TFI Network, during the Tribeca Film Festival, but the event ha been postponed due to the global pandemic crisis. “We’re thrilled to carry on the legacy of Tribeca All Access with this group of directors, producers, and writers,” said Amy Hobby, Executive Director at the Tribeca Film Institute. “These creators are developing projects that are gripping, distinctive, and timely.”
This year’s Mexican grantees are the fiction film Dos estaciones by Juan Pablo González and the documentary film En una esquina de México by Leonor Maldonado García. Produced by Ilana Coleman, Makena Buchanan and Jamie Gonçalves, Dos estaciones is set in the bucolic hills of the Jalisco Highlands, where iron-willed businesswoman María García fights the impending collapse of her family’s tequila factory. As she fights to keep her family’s legacy alive, her understanding of the world is shattered by forces out of her control.
Produced by Tatiana Graullera, En una esquina de México follows Rigo, who every Friday night leaves his family in Brownsville, Texas and crosses the US-Mexico border to return to his hometown of Matamoros where he teaches forty men a choreographed routine. In an environment heavily impacted by drug trafficking, The Dance of the Ejido 20 of Matamoros is a platform where the performers can mourn and release their fears through sweat and physical pain.
Two Nicaraguan filmmakers are among the 14 Tribeca All Access grantees. Directed by Laura Baumeister and produced by Rossana Baumeister and Bruna Haddad, the Nicaraguan fiction film La hija de todas las rabias follows nine-year-old María, who is left at a recycling factory by her struggling mother, joining a workforce of other children. Torn between anger and hope, María resorts to her vivid imagination in order to come to terms with her motherʼs absence and make sense of a chaotic world.
U.S-based Nicaraguan director Milton Guillén’s On the Move, co-produced by Natalia Hernández, follows three visual artists in exile from Syria, Sudan and Nicaragua as they strive to remain emotionally connected to their turbulent home countries. As the film progresses, a kaleidoscopic view of displacement emerges, drawing similarities and contrasts in the emotional burdens of these artists through the eyes of the movement itself.
And lastly, the Tribeca Film Institute has granted Colombian neo-noir documentary film Anhell69 by Theo Montoya, and produced by Juan Pablo Castrillón. After members of the queer scene in Medellin Colombia are cast for a vampire movie, the film’s protagonist—Camilo Najar—dies of a heroin overdose at age 21. The film uses a punk rock aesthetic to explore this generation’s “no future” mindset, as the youth in Colombia grapple with a disarmingly high rate of suicide and drug overdoses,
