Reas by Lola Arias
The Sundance Institute announced the latest documentary fund grantees this past week, including Latin American projects from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, and by Latinx filmmakers in the U.S. The twenty-two selected projects will receive $520,000 in financing for film development and production to postproduction and audience marketing.
Five Latin American projects will receive support for their development: Alis by Nicolas van Hammerlock and Clare Weiskopf from Colombia, focusing on eight teenage girls who lived on the streets of Bogota and give life to a fictional classmate through a creative act; Reas by Lola Arias from Argentina, focusing on a group of women and trans people wait out their sentences, reconstructing scenes from their past lives and imagining their future lives in the form of a musical; Regarding Memory and Neglect by Ricardo Martensen from Brazil, in which memories are questioned via three different stories in the city of São Paulo.
The Cuban-Mexican project Todo lo sólido by Luis Gutiérrez Arias tells the story of an island sinking into the Caribbean Sea; and Yawar Shunku: Bleeding Heart by Antonio Romero Zurita from Ecuador centers on composer Guerardo Guevara who pens his final requiem as he reaches ninety.
Additionally, two Latin American projects will receive support for their postproduction: the Argentine-Uruguayan film Eight Stories About Hearing Loss by Charo Mato, narrating the own story of the filmmaker who, after losing her hearing, decides to unlock and overcome the doubts and fears of her family by having an operation in order to recover the ability; and The Monster and the Storm by Edwin Martinez, following a Puerto Rican cosplayer who embarks on a quest to heal the loss of his father by creating, and eventually becoming, his lifelong hero, Godzilla.
"We’re fortunate to have a collaborative and strong network of partners that allow us to ensure material support for these filmmakers as they develop bold new work, we can ensure that the field of nonfiction storytelling continues to evolve even against larger headwinds," the interim director of the Documentary Film Program, Kristin Feeley, and director Hajnal Molnar-Szakacs said Wednesday in a statement. The grants were made possible by the Open Society Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, among other sources, and with over half of the funding coming from outside the U.S.
