Tropical Tuesdays Presents 'The South Trembles'

By Jerónimo Rodríguez

As Cinema Tropical launches its new weekly film series Tropical Tuesdays this May at Obra Negra/Casa Mezcal in downtown Manhattan, we publish here the notes on the first program 'The South Trembles' which was curated by film critic Jerónimo Rodríguez.

Cinema is capable of shaking up, reinventing, or jolting the way we perceive reality. The Southern Cone's restless past, unsettled present, and even its uncertain future could be defined and redefined by these curious and bold filmmakers. The films included in this series are in one sense narratively daring, some subverting easy classification, or simply, they successfully capture striking moments of rupture, social change, marginality and vanguard.

The first program is Under Construction (The Place Where I Was Born No Longer Exists). Ignacio Aguero's dazzling documentary captures complex moments of transformation in Chilean society through the life of one disappearing neighborhood in Santiago, Chile at the end of the 20th Century as it makes way for new urban development. This piece is accompanied by Home, by visual artist Gianfranco Foschino, a single-take video that portrays another vanishing way of life - Chilean rural living and how it operates.

The second presentation is Hermes Paralluelo’s Yatasto (pictured left), an arresting documentary about a group of boys known as cartoneros, who pick up cardboard for a living on the outskirts of Cordoba, Argentina. Without employing clichés or imposing judgments, this film offers a restrained look at their work and lives, but above all, is a rigorous cinematic immersion into the moving and unique world that unfolds.

The next program pairs two of the most formally daring filmmakers of the Southern Cone:  Argentine Mauro Andrizzi and Chilean José Luis Torres Leiva. Andrizzi's In the Future gathers a visually stunning series of vignettes that speak of sentimental experiences and the expectations that love creates. The film is accompanied by the short, Imperfect Copy, a tribute by Torres Leiva to an agitator in cinema and a true great, the late Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz.

The final two programs will show two sophisticated documentaries that register the work of two radical musical visionaries in Argentina and Chile. Süden, from the talented filmmaker Gaston Solnicki, describes Mauricio Kagel's return to Buenos Aires, an extraordinary Argentinean avant-garde composer who lived much of his life in Germany. Sergio Castro’s haunting Electrodomésticos: Cold Mystery gives insights into the legendary Electrodomésticos and the band's emergence in the second half of the 80s during Chile's suffocating military dictatorship. Süden will be preceded by shorts inspired by music and directed by Martín Rejtman and Solnicki. Along with Electrodomésticos: Cold Mystery, a screening of The Sad Punk, by celebrated artist Mario Navarro, an art video that records the ashes of the anti-dictatorship, underground cultural scene in 1980s Chile.

Click here for the complete lineup and more information.

Jerónimo Rodríguez is a film critic that currently works as a host/critic on the prestigious film review television program, Toma 1, on NY1 Noticias, in New York City. He also contributes as a film columnist for various publications, including People Magazine en Español and the website El Nuevo Canon. In addition he collaborated with the script of the feature film Huacho, which was selected at Cannes 2009 Critics’ Week, and the Toronto International Film Festival and won several awards and funds, including the Sundance Film Festival/NHK International Filmmakers Award. He also edited the feature Sentados frente al fuego (By the Fire) which premiered last year in the official selection of San Sebastian Film Festival.

UNA NOCHE and LA SUERTE EN SUS MANOS Win Prizes at Tribeca

The Tribeca Film Festival, which runs through April 29, announced the winners of its 2012 edition tonight at an awards ceremony at the Conrad New York. The film Una Noche (pictured), which tells the story of three three Cuban teenagers trying to escape to Florida, received three prizes becoming the most awarded film of the competition. Lucy Mulloy's film won the prizes for Best Director, for Best Cinematography for the DPs Trevor Forrest and Shlomo Godder, and for Best Actor for the leads Dariel Arrechada and Javier Nuñez Florian. The film had received a lot of media exposure over the weekend when the news broke about Florian and co-star Anailín de la Rua de la Torre deflecting during a stop in Miami on the way from Cuba to the world premiere of the film in New York.

In its statement, the jury said they decided to give the award for Best Actor to both protagonists "for potent individual performances that together are even greater than the sum of their parts. Playing Raul and Elio, young Cuban men who goad each other on in a dream of fleeing Havana for a fantasy of Miami, Dariel locates Raul’s danger and sexual power as precisely as Javier taps into Elio’s essential sweetness. Both young actors are nonprofessionals who took great risks to tell a daring story. Each won our hearts."

Additionally, the Argentine film All In / La Suerte en sus manos by Daniel Burman received the prize for Best Narrative Screenplay which was written by the director and Sergio Dubcovsky, and comes with a cash prize of $5,000 USD.

For complete list of winners click here.

Report from the Buenos Aires LAB

By Richard Shpuntoff

Founded in 2003 by its co-directors Violeta Bava – an Argentine film producer and programmer for BAFICI (the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival), – and Ilse Hughan – a Dutch film producer who serves on the selection committee for the Hubert Bals Fund – the Buenos Aires Lab (BAL) recently held its ninth edition with the theme "Less is much more BAL" and a selection of 22 films from nine Latin American nations.

The BAL, which operates within the framework of BAFICI, supports the work of independent Latin American producers and directors by offering them a platform to present their projects at various stages to a range of people from the industry: distributors, film festival programmers, and foreign co-producers, among others. In its first couple of years, one of the sections of the BAL, the Work in Progress, was almost exclusively focused on Argentine film, with some representation from Chile and Uruguay, and looked to build bridges for emerging filmmakers to connect them to the European film markets.

Since then, Hughan and Bava have managed to evolve their program into a truly pan-Latin American event. “The production landscape has changed enormously since we founded BAL. Back then there were no other production labs in Latin American, and since then new labs have been created in festivals in Guadalajara and Valdivia, among others. Funding was more plentiful and film production in some nations like Paraguay, Bolivia and Guatemala was practically non-existent,” the directors explained.

"While originally we were looking to teach Latin American producers and directors how to co-produce their films and build relationships with the European film industry, BAL now is looking to promote the building of connections and support within the region, also. We are looking to foster co-productions that function not just at the financial level, but also at the creative level. For the BAL to continue to be relevant it needs to change to meet the current needs of everyone in the industry."

With this in mind, the directors reconfigured some aspects of the BAL, transforming the "One-on-one" meetings, which were basically short private pitching sessions, into small roundtables in which two films are presented to a range of industry people with a moderator to help the conversation stay focused within a thirty minute timeframe. The idea, which Bava and Hughan originally tried out when they served as directors to the production lab at FICCO, is more of a conversation, less of a pitching. One of the goals, which they achieved, was for everyone attending the BAL to meet everyone else, literally.

Martin Schweighofer, the managing director of the Austrian Film Commission who served as one of the moderators, pointed out how over the course of the meetings the presenters began to actually collaborate on their presentations with each other, even sharing a single computer to present materials. In other sessions, Ankara Mastits, a distributor with Pretty Pictures, urged presenters that despite the obvious pressures, "You shouldn’t think about what I, as a distributor, like. You need to make the film you want to make."

The spirit of true co-production could also be seen in the CPH:LAB section of the BAL. The LAB, co-sponsored by the BAL with CPH:DOX International Film Festival, brings together European and non-European filmmakers and producers to collaborate on a film. Gustavo Beck of Brazil and Željka Suková of Croatia presented some clips from their film in production, Approaches, which aims to create a visual dialogue between the two filmmakers through their different methods of approaching each other's worlds. In a very different vein, Fia-Stina Sandlund of Sweden and Alejo Moguillansky of Argentina discussed a fictional film, L.N. Alem, that they are building based on their disagreements about what to film.

At the end of the three days of discussions and presentations, twelve of the films received a range of awards including a pre-sale of $5,000 to Mantarraya for distribution in Mexico, which went to Jazmín López’s Leones, and post-production services from Sinsistema which went to Lina Rodríguez’s Señoritas.

The complete list of awards is as follows:
Agua (Bolivia) – Diego Mondaca, director / producer – Cinecolor Award and Kodak Award.
Chico ventana también quisiera tener un submarino (Uruguay) – Alex Piperno, director, Luka Valenta Rinner, producer – Binger Filmlab Award.
Elon Rabin não acredita na morte (Brazil) – Ricado Alves Jr., director, Thiago Macêdo Correia and Morgana Rissinger – FIDLAB Award
Hasta el sol tiene manchas (Guatemala) – Julio Hernández Cordón, director, Pamela Guinea, producer – Producers Network Award (for the producer) and CPH:DOX Award (for the director).
La helada negra (Argentina) - Maximiliano Schonfeld, director, Bárbara Francisco and Fernando Brom, producers – International Relations ARTE Prize, Eu 6.000.-
Leones (Argentina) – Jazmín López, director, Benjamín Domenech and Santiago Gallelli,
producers –Mantarraya Award.
Quiero vivir su vida (Chile, France) – Luis Cifuentes, director, Margarita Donoso and Stéphane Zajdenweber, producer – Producers Network Award (for producer Stéphane Zajdenweber).
Señoritas (Colombia) – Lina Rodríguez, director, Lina Rodríguez and John Bradley Deane, producers – Sinsistema Award.
Tanta Agua (Uruguay) – Leticia Jorge and Ana Guevara, directors, and Agustina Chiarino, producer – Estudio Ñandu Award.
Viejo Calavera (Bolivia) – Kiro Russo, director / producer – Lahaye Award
Viola (Argentina) – Matías Piñeiro, director, Matías Piñeiro and Melanie Schapiro, producers –Cinecolor Award and Tauro Digital Award

Pictures: Top (from left to right): Ilse Hughan, Violeta Bava, Sergio Wolf and Jazmín López. Bottom (from left to right): Benjamín Domenech, Jazmín López and Santiago Gallelli. Photos courtesy of BAFICI. 

Museum of Fine Arts in Houston Presents 7th Latin Wave Festival

By Hannah Webber

Tomorrow Thursday, April 26 through April 29, the seventh edition of Latin Wave: New Films from Latin America will begin at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The four-day festival, programmed by Cinema Tropical's Co-Founder Monika Wagenberg, will include eight new Latin American films from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

Director Pablo Giorgelli's Las Acacias follows an unlikely trio on their journey from Asunción, Paraguay, to Buenos Aires. Rubén, a surly truck driver, grudgingly transports two illegal immigrants: a young mother and her infant daughter. Along the way, he finds himself increasingly attached to the pair. The Argentine film, whose script won the Coral Award for Best Unpublished Script at the 29th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, is a quiet observation of the protagonists' interactions. 

Also from Argentina, filmmaker Santiago Mitre's El estudiante / The Student which debuted last year at the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival (BAFICI), is an intriguing, fast-paced look into the Argentine university environment. Roque, a student from the suburbs, arrives in Buenos Aires to study social sciences. He soon meets Paula, a beautiful assistant professor, and is thrust into the world of university politics. Before directing this feature, Mitre wrote Pablo Trapero's Cannes-selected films Leonera and Carancho. 

The Argentine/Chilean co-production ¡Vivan las Antípodas! (pictured) asks the question, "If you could dig straight through to the other side of the Earth, where would you end up?" Director, cameraman and editor Victor Kossakovsky, who has received over 100 prizes internationally for his work, creates a visually breathtaking portrait of Earth in his most recent picture. The film, which was screened at this year's South by Southwest festival, examines four sets of antipodes (places that are located at the exact opposite side of the earth from each other).

Chilean director Cristián Jiménez delicately depicts a tragic romance in Bonsái. The film's young protagonists, Julio and Emilia, fall in and out of love. Years after their relationship has ended, Julio, now involved in an awkward affair with his neighbor, decides to write a novel about his romance and youth with Emilia. Jiménez's second feature film is a graceful portrayal of lost love. 

From Brazil, Histórias que só existem quando lembradas / Found Memories  (pictured) tells the story of a young photographer, Rita, and her experience in Jotuomba, a fictional community in rural Brazil whose residents honor the traditions and land that contain their memories. Director Julia Murat's first feature-length fiction film, Found Memories examines a generational and cultural clash between tradition and modernity. 

Fat, Short, and Bald Man (Gordo, calvo y bajito) follows Antonio, the man described in the title, who works in a notary office in Bogota, Colombia. The protagonist of this animated picture is a pitiable middle-aged virgin whose life is rooted in routine. In his first feature film, director Carlos Osuna presents a moving and honest tale of a man's confrontation of his fears and desires.

The Peruvian inclusion in the festival, Bad Intentions (Las malas intenciones), tells the story of Cayetana, an imaginative and isolated nine-year-old girl from a wealthy family living outside of Lima. The film navigates between her daydreams, her experience in a Catholic private school and her home life. Director Rosario García-Montero's coming of age story takes a turn when Cayetana's mother suddenly announces her pregnancy with a new child, and Cayetana declares that she will die the day the baby is born. García-Montero, internationally recognized, was recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film."

Lastly, director Gerardo Naranjo's explosive film, Miss Bala (pictured), will also screen at the film festival. Since it first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, the film has sparked discussion and controversy. The picture tells the story of Laura, a beauty pageant contestant who is unwillingly thrust into the world of Mexico's violent drug war. Inspired by a true story, Naranjo explores the transformations Laura and her nation experience after the harrowing events she has lived.

A Record-Breaking Six Latin American Films at Directors' Fortnight

Directors' Fortnight (la Quinzaine des Réalisateurs),, the independent section of the Cannes Film Festival announced today its lineup for its 2012 edition which includes a record breaking number of six Latin American feature films in its competition: The Uruguayan film 3 by Pablo Stoll; the Mexican-Canadian co-production Fogo by Yulene Olaizola; the Argentine film Infancia clandestina / Clandestine Childhood by Benjamin Ávila; the Chilean-French co-production La noche de enfrente by the late Raoul Ruiz; the Colombian film La Sirga by William Vega; and the Chiean film No by Pablo Larraín.

Since its creation in 1969, never before the Directors' Fortnight had such a heavy presence of Latin American cinema. six out of 21 feature films selected. Additionally, Directors' Fortnight will also feature two Brazilian short films in its official competition: Porcos raivosos / Enraged Pigs by Leonardo Sette et Isabel Penoni, and Os mortos vivos / The Living Dead by Anita Rocha da Silveira.

LOS SALVAJES and AQUÍ Y ALLÁ to Cannes' Critics' Week

The International Critics' Week section of the Cannes Film Festival announced today its official selections for its 51st edition which will run May 17 through 25. Included in the lineup there are two feature films from Latin America: the Argentine film Los Salvajes by Alejandro Fadel, and the Spanish-American-Mexican co-production Aquí y allá / Here and There (pictured) by Antonio Méndez Esparza. The selection also include the Argentine short film Yeguas y cotorras by Natalia Garagiola and the Brazilian short O Duplo by Juliana Rojas.

The International Critics’ Week only programs seven feature films and seven short films annually, and the films compete for the Critics’ Week Grand Prix which is awarded by the press.