MoMA's Doc Fortnight Will Show THE TINIEST PLACE; EL FIELD and ARGENTINIAN LESSON

The Museum of Modern Art announced the lineup of their annual Documentary Fortnight Festival which will feature three Latin American films including Tatiana Huezo's acclaimed debut feature El lugar más pequeño / The Tiniest Place (pictured) as opening film -along with Jim Hubbard's United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The film is the account of the village of Cinquera in El Salvador, where the surviving residents restore the village and their lives after the brutal Civil War of 1980–1992. The Mexican filmmaker will be in attendance to introduce and participate in a post-screening Q&A.

MoMA will also present the US premieres of the Mexican film El Field directed by Daniel Rosas and the Polish film, Argentinian Lesson, by Wojciech Staroń. Rosas' film, shot in California's Imperial Valley and Mexico's Mexicali Valley, illustrates the contrasts between field and desert, urban and countryside, and men and machine. El Field presents cross-border relationships as a stunning, complex, and often chaotic symbiosis. Argentinian Lesson tells the story of Janek, a young Polish boy, is thrust into an unknown world when his family moves to Argentina.

These three films will be co-presented by Ambulante, the celebrated traveling documentary film festival created by Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, and Pablo Cruz; and Cinema Tropical. Established in 2001, MoMA's annual two-week showcase of recent nonfiction film and media takes place each February. This international selection of films present a wide range of creative categories that extend the idea of the documentary form, examines the relationship between contemporary art and nonfiction filmmaking, and reflects on new areas of nonfiction practice.

The Highest Grossing Latin American Films of 2011

A few days ago, news portal LatAmcinema.com, published a special report with the highest grossing local films of 2011 for some Latin American countries, which happened to be mostly comedies. According to information offered by the publication, the most successful film from Argentina was Un cuento chino / Chinese Take-Away, directed by Sebastián Borensztein and starring Ricardo Darín about a hardware salesman and a Chinese boy in Buenos Aires, grossing a whopping equivalent of 4.4 million dollars.

The highest grossing picture for the neighboring country Brazil was Roberto Santucci's De pernas pro ar, a comedy about the exploration of the changes one woman faces after being fired from her job. The most successful Chilean film of the year was a biopic of Violeta Parra entitled Violeta se fue a los cielos by renowned filmmaker Andrés Wood (Machuca), which just had its US premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this week.

The most successful Colombian film was El paseo, director Harold Trompetero's comedy of a family road trip to Cartagena produced by Dago García. In Mexico, the animated film Don Gato y su pandilla, directed by Alberto Mar in co-production with Argentina and based on the American cartoon created by Hannah-Barbera, ranked number one at the box office.

Director Gaston Vizcarra's El Guachimán, a film about an ordinary man's sudden acquisition of a large amount of money, took the top spot in Peru last year. Likewise, Uruguay's top-grossing film was Artigas - La Redota, César Charlone's fusion of history and fantasy that was part of the film series "Libertadores" about key historical figures in the fight for the independence of eight Latin American countries.

Lastly, the Indiana Jones parody, Er Conde Jones: El secreto de la bola criolla written and directed by Benjamín Rausseo, not only topped the year's box office in Venezuela, it became the highest grossing Venezuelan film ever with more than 650,000 spectators.  

 

Watch the trailers:

Argentina: Un cuento chino

 

Brazil: De pernas pro ar

Chile: Violeta se fue a los cielos

Colombia: El paseo

Mexico: Don Gato y su pandilla

Peru: El Guachimán

Uruguay: Artigas- La Redota 

Venezuela: Er Conde Jones

 

Bichir, CHICO AND RITA, Lubezki, Sergio Mendes & Carlinhos Brown Nominated for the Oscars

Even though no Latin American film made it to the list of five nominees for the Foreign Language Film category for this year's Academy Awards, Mexican actor Demián Bichir (pictured) received a nomination as Best Actor for his work as an East L.A. gardener in Chris Weltz's A Better Life. Additionally, the film Chico & Rita by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal about the love story between a young Cuban piano player and a singer received a nomination as Best Animated Feature Film, whilst Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezky was nominated for his work on The Tree of Life. Other Latin American talent nominated for this year's Oscars are Brazilian musicians Sergio Mendes and Carlinhos Brown for their song Real in Rio from the film Rio in the Best Song category. The Oscars will be announced on Sunday, February 26 in Los Angeles.

List of Latino Actors Ever Nominated for an Oscar

As Mexican filmmaker Demián Bichir received this morning a nomination as Best Actor for this year's Academy Awards for his work in Chris Weitz'sA Better Life, TropicalFRONT offers a recount of all of the Latino actors ever nominated for an Academy Award.

The very first Latino actor to receive an nomination was Puerto Rican actor José Ferrer as Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 1948 for his work in Joan of Arc. Just two years later Ferrer became the first Latino actor to win the Oscar for Best Actor for the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac. Anthony Quinn would become the most nominated Latino actor to the Oscars having been nominated as Best Supporting Actor for Viva Zapata! in 1952 and Lust for Life in 1956, winning both times, and receiving nominations as Best Actor in 1957 for Wild is the Wind and in 1964 for Zorba the Greek.

In the nineties Cuban-born actor Andy Garcia was nominated for his supporting role in The Godfather: Part III; and more recently Puerto Rican actor Benicio del Toro took the Oscar as Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 2000 for Traffic, and nabbed another nomination in the same category in 2003 for Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams.

In regards to Latina Actress, the first one ever to receive a nomination was Mexican actress Katy Jurado for her supporting role in Broken Lance in 1954. Few years later, Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno won the Oscar as Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her legendary role as Anita in West Side Story in 1961. Norma Aleandro became the first and only Argentine actor to date to be nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role in Luis Mandoki's Gaby: A True Story in 1987.

Only three Latin American women have been nominated as Best Actress: Fernanda Montenegro for Central Station in 1998; Salma Hayek for Frida in 2002; and Catalina Sandino for Maria Full of Grace in 2004. No Latina has ever won the Oscar as Best Actress in a Leading Role to date.

Pictured (from left to right): Rita Moreno, Anthony Quinn and Benicio del Toro.

MISS BALA: A Beauty Queen as a Stand-In for a Nation in Shock

By Naief Yehya

We are on the cusp of a new era of Mexican cinema in which the bitter reality imposed by the war on drug trafficking is finally being treated as a film-worthy subject, used both as entertainment and to invoke moral reflection. In the past, Mexican cinema has been characterized by decades of implicit censorship of any criticism of the governing PRI party or the military. This new wave of cinema, and the collapse of the archaic structures governing the content, budgets and distribution of movies, coincides with the intensification of a grand-scale conflict: the mutual bloodbath between cartels and the government that has made the civilians daily collateral damage. With so much violence, the Mexican population, confused and terrorized, has lost the ability to understand or act and culture has come to a virtual standstill.

The critical and economic triumphs that Mexican cinema has seen in recent years has help us transition from institutional revolutionary silence to a state of euphoria and complacency that has resulted in cultural standstill. While this moment of chaos could lead to a wave of grotesque narco-cinema that exploits the atrocious violence contaminating society, Gerardo Naranjo (Drama/Mex and Voy a explotar) has chosen a different approach with his latest film, Miss Bala. The movie was inspired by the case of Laura Zuñiga, Miss Sinaloa 208, who was arrested along with a number of members of the Juarez Cartel. The young Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman) dreams of participating in the Miss Baja California pageant. She ends up surviving a shoot-out at a local club, but the friend who brought her there is missing. Instead of escaping, Laura tries to find her friend and winds up involved with the boss of the fictitious Star Cartel, who forces her to work as a driver and mule in exchange for not killing her father and her brother. This same boss later buys Laura first place in the pageant.

 Naranjo didn’t intend to do a film that explores the complexities and strategies of organized crime, nor did he originally want to make a film about narco-trafficking. This fact has caused mixed reactions; while there are those who praise the film for its indirect and emotional approach to narco-trafficking, others have accused it of being cowardly, misleading or complacent (especially since the crew had to pay off a local cartel during the filming). Naranjo makes it implicit that the Star Cartel traffics narcotics, but “does not include images of drugs,” as Miriam Canales pointed out in an interview for the magazine, Replicante. What he did aim to show was the condition of the victim, an innocent young girl who finds herself tangled up in an incomprehensible web where power figures operate with criteria that she doesn’t understand, where her free will is irrelevant, and where she risks being sacrificed at any moment and for any reason without anyone to protect her. The only sure thing about Laura, who even loses her name, (baptized “Canelita” by the drug traffickers’ boss), is her vulnerability. Faced with the dilemma of how to tackle such a painful and difficult subject, Naranjo avoids the temptation of sensationalism and opts to show the emotional impact of war neither from the viewpoint of the corrupt authorities nor the criminals.

The main attribute of Miss Bala is not its realism but its almost dreamlike narrative flow in which Laura seems to float from situation to situation. Laura represents the condition of a society paralyzed with fear, shock and often involuntary complacency. There is no redemption and there is no consolatory justice, but there also isn’t a sense of exploitative desperation. What we see is a snapshot of the everyday tragedy that has turned these people into cannon fodder.

Naief Yehya (1963) Industrial engineer, journalist, writer and cultural critic. His work deals mainly with the impact of technology, mass media, propaganda and pornography in culture and society. His most recent book is Technoculture (Tusquets, 2008).

Latin American Films Snubbed for this Year's Oscars

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences released this morning its shortlist of nine films to compete in the Best Foreign Language Film category for this year's edition of the Oscars, and surprisingly no Latin American films were included in the list. The only Latin American reference in the shortlist was the Danish filmSuperclásico directed by Ole Christian Madsen which is set and was shot on location in Buenos Aries.

The strongest Latin American candidate to make it to this year's shortlist was the Mexican submission Miss Bala by Gerardo Naranjo, which opens in New York and LA this Friday, January 20. Mexico has been nominated in eight occasions and has never won the award for Best Foreign Language Film. In the past few years only Argentina has taken home the coveted award for El secreto de sus ojos / The Secret in their Eyes by Juan José Campanella in 2010.