Carlos Diegues Selected as Head of Camera d'or Jury at Cannes

The Cannes Film Festival has announced that the veteran Brazilian director Carlos Diegues will chair the jury for this year's Camera d'or prize which is awarded to the best first film in the Official Selection, the Directors' Fortnight or in the Critics' Week sections of the French festival. This year 22 international films will be competing for the award including the Latin American films La playa by Juan Andrés Arango (Colombia), and Villegas by Gonzal Tobal (Argentina).

The other members of the Camera d'or Jury are Italian journalist Gloria Satta, Remy Chevrin from the French Association of Film Cinematographers, Herve Icovic from France's Federation of Cinema, Audiovisual and Multimedia Industries, Michel Andriey from France's Society of Film Directors and French Union of Film Critic's Francis Gavelle.

Throughout his stunning career, spanning over five decades, Diegues has directed directed more than 20 feature films, documentaries and shorts, including Xica da Silvia (1976), Bye Bye Brazil (1980), Orfeu (1999) and God is Brazilian (2003), among others. The Brazilian director and the rest of the jury will announce the winner at the festival's closing ceremony, set on May 27th.

Hefty Latin American Presence at the LA Film Fest

The Los Angeles Film Festival just announced their 2012 line-up. With a total of over 62 feature length films and documentaries, 79 shorts, and 40 music videos of US and international selections, many of these selections include various Latin American films from Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, and Cuba.

This year La brújula la lleva el muerto / The Compass is Carried by the Dead Man (Arturo Pons, Mexico) and De domingo a jueves / Thursday till Sunday (Dominga Sotomayor, Chile) will be screening their US Premiere as part of the Narrative Competition, whilst Cuates de Australia / Drought (Everado González, Mexico) will be screening its US Premiere at the festival in the Documentary Competition.

The International Showcase of the festival will be screening four Latin American films: Canícula (José Álvarez, Mexico), El último Elvis / The Last Elvis (Armando Bo, Argentina, pictured), O som ao redor / Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendoça Filho, Brazil), and El árbol de las fresas / The Strawberry Tree (Simone Rapisarda Casanova, Canada/Cuba/ Italy). The Summer Showcase section will feature the Latino docs Reportero (Bernardo Ruiz, USA/Mexico), and La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus (Mark Kendall, USA/ Guatemala) and Searching for Sugar Man (Malik Bendjelloul, USA). And finally, the Cuban zombie flick Juan of the Dead (Alejandro Brugués, Cuba, pictured left) will also be show in The Beyond section of the film.

The 18th edition of the Los Angeles Film Festival will run form June 14 through June 24. Click here for the complete lineup.

Peruvian Film LAS MALAS INTENCIONES Wins Cine Las Americas in Austin

The Cine Las Americas Festival celebrating its 15th anniversary announced the winners of its most recent edition that ran April 24-29. Peruvian film Las malas intenciones / The Bad Intentions by Rosario García-Montero was the big winner of this year's festival receiving the prizes for Best Film and the Audience Award. The jury gave a couple of special prizes: a Special Jury Award for Individual Performance to Kisha Tikina Burgos for her performance in the Puerto Rico/US co-production Under My Nails by Arí Maniel Cruz; and a Special Jury Award for Ensemble Performance to Andrés Almeida and Jessy Bulbo for their leading roles in the Mexican film El lenguaje de los machetes / Machete Language by Kyzza Terrazas.

The prize for Best Documentary went to the Canadian-Cuban co-production El árbol de las fresas / The Strawberry Tree by Simone Rapisarda Casanova, and the jury gave a Special Mention to the Mexican film Morir de pie / Die Standing Up by Jacaranda Correa. The Audience Award in the documentary category was for Trisha Ziff's La maleta mexicana / The Mexican Suitcase.

Click here for the complete list of winners.

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.