A handful of Latin American non-fiction film projects, from Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, were among the winners of the Industry Awards at the 2020 edition of the Visions du Réel film festival in Switzerland, which was held online.
The Argentine project Reas by Lola Arias, was the winner of the HEAD Genève Postproduction Award, which consists of color grading and creation of the files as deliverables. Arias’ new project is set at the Ezeiza Prison in Buenos Aires. A group of women and trans people wait out their sentences — reconstructing scenes from their past lives and imagining their futures in the form of a musical in which they sing, dance, and perform.
Also from Argentina, Gastón Solnicki’s A Little Love Package was the winner of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival Award consisting of accreditation and accommodation to TDF and access to AGORA for one person. Solnicki’s new project is a female-centric comedy set in Vienna.
Chilean documentarian Ignacion Agüero won the asterisk* Marketing Award, consisting of a consulting session on audience design and marketing for his new project Notes for a Film. The Chilean project freely inspired by the book Ten Years in Araucania by Gustave Verniory, retraces the radical transformation of the Araucania territory, following its annexation by the independent republic of Chile. (1865–1949).
The Mexican film Malintzin 17 by the late documentarian Eugenio Polgovsky, posthumously edited by his sister Mara was the winner of two prizes, the Freestudios DCP Delivery Package Award and the visions sud est Award for Best project from from the Global South. Shot from the window of the filmmaker’s apartment in Mexico City, the film portrays two parallel expressions of parental care, by interweaving the filmmaker’s gaze with his daughter’s as they witness the birth of an Incan dove. During seven days and seven nights, the dove’s mother nests her chick on a perilous intersection of electric cables. The protagonists’ bird’s-eye view offers an unexpected vista on urban life, human-animal entanglements, and everyday forms of encounter, conflict and affection in the city.
