Launching of the New Weekly Film Series Tropical Tuesdays

Cinema Tropical has announced the launching of Tropical Tuesdays, a new and exciting microcinema (small cinemathéque) initiative that will feature guest curators and create monthly programs with screenings every Tuesday at Obra Negra at Casa Mezcal in downtown Manhattan.

The aim of this new initiative is to provide a creative platform for innovative curatorial experimentation in Latin American cinema, as well as to become a salon that can serve as a meeting place for local Latin American filmmaking and visual arts communities. “Cinema Tropical originally got started as a weekly film series in downtown Manhattan over a decade ago, so we’re excited to go back to our origins with this new project,” says Carlos A. Gutiérrez, Director of the non-profit organization.

The films will be screened on digital format in an informal setting, free and open to the public. The program will include special guests for discussion following the screenings. Tropical Tuesdays will kick off this May, and the first confirmed guest curators are Chilean film critic Jerónimo Rodríguez and Peruvian filmmaker/curator Juan Daniel F. Molero.

The launching program of Tropical Tuesdays will be “The South Trembles,” curated by Rodríguez for the month of May. This program is a playful take on cinema’s potential to question, reinvent and jolt our perception of reality. South America’s restless past, unsettled present, and even its uncertain future could be defined and redefined by some curious and bold filmmakers. The program features films by Chilean and Argentinean directors such as Ignacio Agüero, Gastón Solnicki, Mauro Andrizzi and José Luis Torres Leiva. The works in in this series, many of them having their New York premiere, are narratively daring, subverting easy classification, and they successfully capture striking moments
of rupture, social change, marginality and vanguard.

For June, Molero has curated the program “Subversive Churches And Mundane Icons,” a provocative meditation on cultural colonialism and religious syncretism. The filmmakers featured in this program, including Luis Buñuel, Albert Serra and Amat Escalante, have adapted fragments of the Bible, the Catholic iconography, and other methods of religious propaganda, such as Brazilian Televangelism, to subvert the power of images. Cinema itself has become a religion, one not based on text but on an audiovisual preaching that creates mundane icons and subversive churches.

Click here to read the complete lineup for May and June. 

Pictured: A still from Los Electrodomésticos: El frío misterio by Sergio Castro (Chile) and a film still from Analogía do Verme by Carlosmagno Rodrigues & Cris Ventura (Brasil).

Global Film Initiative Awards Peruvian and Venezuelan Projects

San Francisco-based Global Film Initiative announced today the ten film projects that have been selected to receive production funds as part of the Initiative's Winter 2012 granting cycle which include two projects from Latin America: Chicama (pictured) by Omar Forero Alva from Peru and El Regreso / The Return by Patricia Ortega from Venezuela.

Chicama is the story of César, who dreams of living in cosmopolitan Trujillo, but a lack of available teaching posts there takes him to a bucolic Andean village, where he unwittingly falls for his charming students and a captivating colleague. El Regreso tell the story of a young Wayuu girl narrowly escapes the massacre of her beach-dwelling community at Bahia Portete and then attempts to rebuild her life in urban Maracaibo, where she befriends a Castilian girl and learns to overcome differences in language and culture.

The Global Film Initiative is a U.S.-based international arts organization specializing in cultural diplomacy, education and literacy through film. Established in 2002, it has awarded numerous grants to filmmakers in emerging nations around the world, and promoted community arts and education through distribution and exhibition of its signature world cinema series, Global Lens.

LOS ÚLTIMOS CRISTEROS Tops Toulouse Latin American Film Fest

The Mexican film Los últimos cristeros / The Last Christeros (pictured) by Matías Meyer won the top prize at the 24th edition of the Toulouse Latin American Film Festival (Cinélatino, Rencontres de Toulouse), which ran March 24 through April 1. The jury also gave a Special Mention to the Chilean film Sentados frente al fuego / Seated by the Fire by Alejandro Fernández Almendras.

 The Turkish-Nicaraguan co-production film Una vida sin palabras / A Life Without Words by Adam Isenberg took the top prize as Best Documentary, whilst Andrés Wood's Violeta se fue a los cielos / Violeta Went To Heaven from Chile took home the Audience Award. Additionally, on the Cinema en Construction section for films in development, the main prize went to the Colombian project La Sirga by William Andrés Vega.

For a list of all the awards click here.

Chilean Film POST MORTEM by Pablo Larraín Opens April 11 at NYC's Film Forum

The distribution film company Kino Lorber  announced this week the theatrical premiere run of the acclaimed Chilean film Post Mortem by Pablo Larraín at Film Forum in New York City. The film will have a two-week engagement, from April 11 - 24.

A companion film to Larraín's critically acclaimed Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem is a macabre, comic drama that begins during the onset of the bloody 1973 Chilean military coup that overthrew democratically elected President Salvador Allende. Alfredo Castro (who starred as the disco-obsessed, white-suited title character in Tony Manero) is a dour coroner's assistant who, while obsessively wooing an erotic dancer at the Bim Bam Bum cabaret, is caught up in a historic, cataclysmic event. His ordinarily dull job is now under military command. As anonymous bodies chaotically pile up in the hallway of the morgue, he is given the task of performing an autopsy on a key government figure.

Once again, Larraín invests his characters with metaphoric undertones, suffusing Santiago with rich period detail and a surreal visual texture that evokes the nightmarish landscape it was rapidly becoming. Post Mortem premiered at the 2010 Venice Film Festival and was featured at the New York Film Festival.

POV Celebrates 25 Years with Strong Mexican and Latino Component

POV (Point of View), the celebrated PBS award-winning documentary series has announced its lineup celebrating its 25th annual season which will air from June 21-October 18. The celebration will have a strong Latino component with five feature films and a short film, three of them featuring Mexican stories.

The Latin American documentary contingent that will be featured include the Mexican feature films Reportero by Bernardo Ruiz; El Velador / The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada (pictured); and Presunto culpable / Presumed Guilty by Roberto Hernández, Layda Negrete, and Geoffrey Smith. The lineup also includes the acclaimed Chilean film Nostalgia de la luz / Nostalgia for the Light by Patricio Guzmán; and two American productions focused on Guatemala: the feature film Granito: How to Nail a Dictactor by Peter Kinoy, Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís; and the short film Sin país / Without Country by Theo Rigby.

Launched in 1988 to showcase new and challenging point-of-view documentaries on PBS, POV has grown to become American television's longest-running series dedicated to contemporary nonfiction programming. POV films have won virtually every major film and broadcasting honor, including Academy Awards®, Emmys® and Peabodys.

LOS ÚLTIMOS CRISTEROS and CUATES DE AUSTRALIA Winners of the Riviera Maya Film Fest

The first edition of the Riviera Maya Film Festival came to a close last night in which Mexican films Los últimos cristeros / The Last Christeros (pictured) by Matías Meyer and Cuates de Australia / Drought by Everardo González were the big winners, each receiving a cash prize of $300,00 Mexican pesos (about $25,000 USD). The jury was composed by Uruguayan producer Sandino Saravia, Mexican documentary filmmaker Eugenio Polgovsky and Argentine film critic Diego Lerer.

In parallel to the official selection in the Mexican competitions, awards were given in the RivieraLAB for projects in development. Three projects were selected to receive a cash prize of $200,000 Mexican pesos (about $16,000 USD) for development: Tormentero / Stormmaker by Rubén Imaz (Mexico); Réimon by Rodrigo Moreno (Argentina); and Nueva España the new project by Raya Martin (Philippines). Additionally in the Work in Progress section, the Uruguayan project Tanta agua by filmmakers Ana Guevara and Leticia Jorge Romero won the main prize for postproduction, whilst the Brazilian project Material de composición by Pedro Aspahan received a Special Mention.

After its first edition, the Riviera Maya Film Festival promises to become an important showcase for Mexican cinema as well as a solid platform for international films.