Film at Lincoln Center and Cinema Tropical have announced the fifth edition of Neighboring Scenes, the annual wide-ranging showcase of contemporary Latin American cinema featuring established auteurs as well as fresh talent from the international festival scene, February 14-18.
Neighboring Scenes spans a wide geographic range, highlighting the breadth of styles, techniques, and approaches employed by Latin American filmmakers today. The fifth edition of the film series is programmed by Carlos A. Gutiérrez, executive director of Cinema Tropical, and Cecilia Barrionuevo, artistic director of Mar del Plata Film Festival, and includes seven North American premieres and five U.S. premieres with four guest filmmakers in person.
The Opening Night selection is Joanna Reposi Garibaldi’s documentary Lemebel, an intimate portrait of pioneering queer writer and visual artist Pedro Lemebel, told with unprecedented access and footage. Other highlights of the lineup are Pablo Larraín’s Ema, an electrifying character study anchored by performances from Gael García Bernal and Mariana Di Girolamo; José Luis Torres Leiva’s tender, emotionally raw Death Will Come and Shall Have Your Eyes, a poetic meditation on death, mortality, and selfless love in the face of terminal illness; and five short films: Daniela Delgado Viteri’s Shortcuts, Miguel Hilari’s Bocamina, Pablo Mazzolo’s Green Ash, Alejandro Alonso’s Home, and Ulises Conti’s Persona 5.
Documentaries are strongly featured in the Neighboring Scenes lineup, including Maíra Bühler’s Let It Burn, which follows the marginalized residents of São Paulo’s Dom Pedro hostel as they struggle with addiction, loneliness, and the threat of eviction; Private Fiction, Argentinean documentarian Andrés Di Tella’s cinematic reconstruction of his late parents’ turbulent love story, told through their personal letters and photos; Marcelo Gomes’s engaging travelogue Waiting for the Carnival, a portrait of a small Brazilian village dominated by the production of denim; the essay film Pirotecnia, which finds director Federico Atehortúa Arteaga examining the uncanny relationship between his mother, Colombian cinema, and the country’s history of armed conflict; and Miguel Hilari’s lyrical Compañía, which blurs past and present, dream and reality in its portrayal of an indigenous Andean community’s return home for a festival of the dead after migrating to the city.
The lineup also showcases multiple debut features, including Jo Serfaty’s coming-of-age story Sun Inside, which follows four teenagers from the Rio de Janeiro favelas in the days leading up to the 2016 Summer Olympics; Salomón Pérez’s In the Middle of the Labyrinth, a boy-meets-girl teenage love story that evokes both slacker cinema and formal documentary; Workforce, a poignant and astute meditation on class warfare from Mexican director David Zonana; Lucía Garibaldi’s provocative, menace-tinged portrait of unrequited love and sexual awakening The Sharks, winner of the Sundance 2019 World Cinema Dramatic Best Director Award; Clemente Castor’s format-shifting hangout film Prince of Peace, capturing the daily routines, fights, and uncanny discoveries of a group of Mexican teenagers; and Again Once Again, which finds director Romina Paula playing a fictionalized version of herself opposite her own mother and son in a richly personal exploration of motherhood.
Check out the full lineup here: https://www.cinematropical.com/neighboring-scenes.
