The Berlinale's World Cinema Fund has announced the winning projects for its 22th round of support and two of the films hail from Latin America. Brazilian production Time was Endless / Antes o Tempo não Acabava by directors Sérgio Andrade and Fábio Baldo, and the Argentine production Hunting Season / Temporada de caza by Natalia Garagiola will both receive 30,000 euros of funding.
Time was Endless tells the story of an indigenous young man living in a clash between their traditional culture and life in the capital Manaus.
Hunting Season (pictured left) follows Nahuel, a high school senior who has recently lost his mother. Put under the custody of his estranged father Nahuel is forced to relocate to a small village near the mountains in Southern Argentina where he clashes with his new environment.
Since WCF’s establishment in October 2004, they have awarded production and distribution funding to a total of 130 projects chosen from 2,500 submissions from around the world. All WCF-funded films produced to date have screened in cinemas or film festivals globally, evidence of the success of the program.
The World Cinema Fund is an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Berlin International Film Festival, in cooperation with the German Federal Foreign Office, with further support by the Goethe-Institut.
Cinema Slate -a new distribution label specialized in foreign cinema (with an emphasis in Latin American films)- has recently announced the theatrical opening of the Brazilian documentary I Touched All Your Stuff / A vida privada dos hipopotamos, following the film’s US premiere at the Museum of the Moving Image's First Look series earlier this year.
Co-directed by Maíra Bühler and Matias Mariani and acclaimed as "enjoyably quirky (…) A rather delightfully offbeat film" (Screen Daily), I Touched All Your Stuff tells the story of how Chris Kirk, a brilliant IT technician from Michigan, left a stable job in Olympia, Washington, moved to Bogotá, fell in love with a mysterious woman and ended up in a Brazilian jail for international drug smuggling.
As Chris Kirk began to re-construct the story of his relationship with "V" from prison, he authorized both filmmakers to retrieve an 80 GB hard-drive that was in his friend's possession in the US. That drive supposedly contained the digital reminiscences of his life in Colombia -- and an outburst of videos, pictures, emails, chat exchanges and other data that would offer proof of his innocence and shed new light onto V's identity.
New York-based Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva was the big winner at 2015 Outfest. His film Nasty Baby (pictured left) took home the top prize for Best U.S. Dramatic Feature. This is Silva’s third English-language film— Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and Magic Magic made festival rounds in 2013. Silva made his big splash on the film scene in 2009 with his critically acclaimed film The Maid.
In the screenwriting category Carlos Ciurlizza and Mauricio Hoyos’ Peruvian-American feature Sebastian, won Best Screenwriting in a U.S. Dramatic Feature. The drama tells the story of Sebastian who returns to his hometown to care for his ill mother, forcing him to come to terms with his past.
Mate Alberdi’s acclaimed film Tea Time (La once) follows a group of five Chilean women who have gathered once a month for the past 60 years to speak their minds—and reveal the current state of their hearts and souls. In an abiding ritual of friendship and survival, these now-elderly Santiago women have come together for tea and pastries—and talk—during an era of intense social and personal change. 
While all five core participants—Alicia, Gema, Angélica, Ximena and Maria Teresa (Alberdi’s grandmother)—have similar backgrounds and all graduated from the same Catholic high school in the 1950s, their lives have taken different paths. One has never married: “She had lovers, but no one gave her what she wanted,” says Maria Teresa, who does most of the narration. Others had husbands in the military, while another who was not able to pursue college takes continuing-education courses. High school photographs show all five in the bloom of youth; the film illuminates them in the sometimes hard-won glow of a lifetime of experiences. 
Alberdi sees a timelessness in this ritual. “As a granddaughter of one of the characters, I have been observing this monthly rite since childhood, and I have always seen the women in the same way: They have never aged. I’m interested in portraying this new way of living old age—in which new possibilities arise, though inevitably, they may be the last ones.” 
The Locarno Film Festival unveiled the lineup for its 68th edition last week featuring an array of Latin American titles, heavy on Brazilian features. This year’s Festival will close with Brazilian filmmaker Sérgio Machado’s Heliopolis, as a part of the Piazza Grande showcase. The Piazza Grande section focuses on films that explore key moments in past and recent history as well as present day dilemmas. Heliopolis is based on a true story about a violinist asked to choose between his career and teaching teens music in Sao Paulo’s biggest favela.
In the Concorso Cineasti Del Presente section showcases films that have ensemble casts, film essays or politically driven works relative to today. The lineup features three Latin American world premieres; the Argentine-South Korean production El movimiento by Benjamín Naishtat, the follow up to his debut History of Fear; Brazilian-Portuguese-French production Olmo & The Seagull (pictured right) co-directed by Petra Costa (Elena); and the Colombian-German production Siembra, the debut feature film by Ángela Osorio Rojas and Santiago Lozano.
