Tribeca Announces 2014 Latin American Media Arts Fund Winners

The Tribeca Film Institute announced the winners of the 2014 TFI Latin America Media Arts Fund, which provides grants, professional guidance and an entrance into the U.S. industry to documentary, animation, or hybrid feature-length films from innovative film and video artists living and working in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America.

The Heineken Voces Grant supports Latino American filmmakers who reside and work in the United States. The TFI/Bloomberg Fellowship, grants awards to Brazilian, Chilean and Mexican documentary filmmakers (living in their respective countries) in order to aid in the development of their projects at any stage.

This year's TFI Latin America Media Arts Fund grants include:

El Charro de Toluquilla (Mexico, pictured above), directed and Produced by José Villalobos Romero. El Charro de Toluquilla tells the story of Jaime García—a mariachi singer and braggart who lives his life like a chauvinistic vintage Mexican movie character, but with one difference: he is HIV-positive.

Feral (Mexico), directed by Andrés Eichelmann Kaiser; produced by Nicole Maynard Pinto, Juan Hernández and Osvaldo Montaño. A series of videotapes serve as the only witness to the tragic death of priest Juan Felipe, who had been trying to re-educate three wild children. The truth will be revealed through the reconstruction of different events.

Pizarro (Colombia), directed by Simón Hernández; produced by Christian Bitar Giraldo. This film follows the personal quest of María José Pizarro to reconstruct her life and the life and death of her guerilla leader father, in order to reconcile with him.

The Belly of the Whale (Cuba, pictured right), written and directed by Horizoe García; produced by Ivonne Cotorruelo. Three Cuban families strive to rise above their socioeconomic limitations and start a new chapter in their lives—hoping to break the inertia and apathy plaguing the country.

Four Bloomberg Fellows, one from each region, will be awarded a $12,000 grant and an invitation to participate in the workshop in their home country. They include:

Beaverland (Chile), directed by Antonio Luco & Nicolás Molina; produced by Francisco Hervé. Derek and Giorgia, a young couple of biologists, enter the hostile land of Tierra del Fuego to investigate a devastating plague of beavers sweeping the area.

Jonas and the Circus Without a Tent (Brazil), written and Directed by Paula Gomes; Co-Written by Haroldo Borges; produced by Marcos Bautista and Ernesto Molinero. Jonas is 13 years old and his life's dream is to maintain the circus he created in his backyard. While he faces this challenge, he will live the adventure of growing up.

Patient (Colombia), written, produced and directed by Jorge Caballero. In Patient a young woman struggles to beat her recent cancer diagnosis, all while her mother persistently fights the bureaucratic health care system in Colombia.

The Mermaid and the Myth of the Eternal Return (Mexico, pictured left), directed by Luis Rincón; produced by Cristina Velasco. In a Nicaraguan fishing community, divers are getting sick. They descend to the sea looking for lobster and return to the surface with their bodies paralyzed. With no other explanation, the old men in the village believe the divers have raised the anger of a mythical “Mermaid.”

The Heineken VOCES Award is part of the Latin America Media Arts Fund and is granted to one documentary and one narrative project annually. This year's winners include:

Sanson and Me (Mexico), 2014, directed by Rodrigo Reyes; produced by Inti Cordera & Su Kim. A coming-of-age of two Mexican immigrants with parallel lives: one is a country boy serving a life sentence for a murder conviction, and the other is the filmmaker himself—a middle-class intellectual from Mexico City. Sanson and Me is an essay film that reflects on how issues of class, poverty, immigration and gang violence intersect with the American Dream.

La Raya (Mexico, pictured right), 2014, written and directed by Yolanda Cruz. The mysterious appearance of a refrigerator in the outskirts of La Raya, a remote village in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, promises business, money and success for 11 year-old Papio, a precocious boy who dreams of his father’s return from the United States.

Jurors for this year’s Latin Fund, who included Paula Heredia, Matías Ehrenberg and Julian Schnabel, selected the recipients from a group of finalists narrowed from 170 submissions.

Directors' Fortnight Selects Diego Lerman's REFUGIADO

The Argentinean film Refugiado, the fourth feature film by Diego Lerman, will be the only Latin American film in competition at this year's Directors' Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival.

Starring Sebastián Molinaro and Julieta Díaz, Refugiado is in the words of the filmmaker, "an urban road movie and a sort of domestic thriller at the same time. It’s a living, simple and very emotional film."

Dressed in a Spiderman costume, four year-old Matías arrives at a women’s shelter with his mother Laura, and Tito, his little plastic dinosaur. They spend two days at the shelter, adapting to new rules of cohabitation and coming across many discoveries. Laura decides to leave the shelter, to set out and rebuild her broken family. With Matías, she begins a whirlwind tour through the city, where things once familiar now pose a threat. In this film, part-thriller and part-domestic road movie, strange characters and situation are triggers, always reflected through the eyes of Matías, for whom reality has unexpectedly turned into a true mystery. Slowly, Matías comes to term with the deep transformation of his world and all that is around him.

Lerman returns to Directors' Fornight after he premiered his previous film there, La mirada invisible / The Invisible Eye in 2010. He has also directed Mientras tanto / Meanwhile (2007) and Tan de repente / Suddenly (2003).

The 2014 edition of Directors' Fortnight will take place May 15-25 in Cannes, France. 

Critics' Week Selects Colombian Film GENTE DE BIEN

The Colombian film Gente de bien (pictured), the directorial debut feature by Franco Lolli has been announced today as the only Latin American film competing at Cannes' parallel section International Critics' Week.

Set in Cali, Lolli's family drama focus on a 10-year-old boy who is abandoned by his mother and finds himself living with his father, a modest handyman who works for an upper-class household. In the lineup announcement Charles Tesson, director of the Critics' Week said that the Colombian film was reminiscent Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But… in its portrayal of a young boy discovering social inequality.

Lolli studied filmmaking at France's La Femis, and his second short film Rodri, played at Cannes' Directors' Fotnight in 2012. The scrip for Gente de bien participated at Cannes' Cinefondation Residence.

The 53rd edition of the Critics' Week will take place May 15-23 in Cannes, France.

In Memoriam: Gabriel García Márquez and Cinema

Sad news emerged from Mexico City yesterday as the celebrated Nobel-winner writer Gabriel García Márquez died at the age of 87. Born in Aracataca, Colombia on March 6, 1927 the acclaimed novelist had a close, passionate and influential relationship with cinema throughout his career, including considering becoming a filmmaker at a certain point of his life.

García Márquez's initial contact with cinema was through film criticism. Working as a columnist for the newspaper El Universal de Cartagena in 1948 he wrote about some films. A couple of years later and working for the newspaper El Heraldo de Barranquilla he also wrote some film reviews under the nom de plume Septimus. In 1953 he moved to Bogotá and wrote for El espectador. Each Saturday, for a year and a half, he wrote the column "El cine en Bogotá, estrenos de la semana," which became very influential in the development of film criticism in Colombia.

In 1954 with his friends Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Enrique Grau Araújo and Luis Vicens, he co-directed the experimental surrealist short film La langosta azul / The Blue Lobster. The silent 16mm film tells the story of a foreign intelligence agent called El Gringo, who investigates the presence of radioactivity in some lobsters caught in a fishing village in the Caribbean. As he takes a break at his hotel, a cat steals the lobster. Upset and distressed, El Gringo goes out to the streets in their search for it.

A year later, in 1955, he enrolled to study filmmaking at the prestigious Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, Italy, where he would meet Cuban directors Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa, Argentinean director Fernando Birri, as well as screenwriter Cesar Zavattini of The Bicycle Thief, who became an influential mentor of his. Yet, he was a student in film school for only a few months before migrating to Mexico.

During the sixties and seventies he worked as a screenwriter in different projects in Mexico including El gallo de oro / The Golden Cockerel (1964), directed by Roberto Gavaldón based on a story by Juan Rulfo; Tiempo de Morir / A Time to Day (1966, pictured above right), which was Arturo Ripstein's directorial debut and co-written with Carlos Fuentes; 4 contra el crimen (1968) by Sergio Véjar; Presagio / Presage (1975) by Luis Alcoriza; and El año de la peste (1979) by Felipe Cazals, among other films. In 1966 he taught screenwriting at the Centro de Estudios Universitarios (CUEC). 

It is in 1965 that his first literary work is adapted for the big screen: En este pueblo no hay ladrones / There Are No Thieves in This Village, directed by Alberto Isaac and based on a short story of Gabriel García Márquez, which included some high-profile cameos by Luis Buñuel, Leonora Carrington, Juan Rulfo and García Márquez himself. In 1969 Manuel Michel directed Patsy, mi amor starring Ofelia Medina in the leading role and based on a story by García Márquez.

In 1979, Chilean director Miguel Littín directed La viuda de Montiel / The Widow of Montiel starring Geraldine Chaplin and Katy Jurado based on a short story by the Colombian writer, which had its world premiere in the official competition of the Berlin Film Festival. That same year he worked in the film adaptation of his own story María de mi corazón / Mary My Dearest (pictured left above) directed by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo and starring María Rojo.

Later in his life, García Márquez continued working as a screenwriter for films such as Fábula de la bella palomera / The Fable of the Beautiful Pigeon Fancier by Ruy Guerra; Milagro en Roma / Miracle in Rome (1989) by Lisandro Duque; Edipo alcalde / Oedipus Mayor (1996) by Jorge Alí Triana. 

Other adaptations of his most celebrated novels include Eréndira (1983) by Brazilian director Guerra, in which García Márquez also worked in the screenplay; Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987) by Italian director Francesco Rossi; El coronel no tiene quien le escriba / No One Writes to the Colonel (1999, pictured left) by Mexican director Ripstein; Love in the Time of Cholera (2007, pictured above right) by British director Mike Newell; Del amor y otros demonios / Of Love and Other Demons (2009) by Costa Rican director Hilda Hidalgo; and more recently, Memoria de mis putas tristes / Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Danish director Henning Carlsen. 

García Márquez film legacy is also present in the creation of the Fundación de Cine Latinoamericano in 1985, and of the Escuela de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba a year later, both institutions became leading protagonists in the creation and promotion of Latin American cinema. 

Watch the short film La langosta azul (1954):

Two Argentinean Films Headed to Cannes

The Argentinean film Retratos salvajes / Wild Tales (pictured) by Damian Szifron has been announced this morning as the only Latin American film participating in this year's official competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Szifron's film, starring Ricardo Darín, Leonardo Sbaraglia and Darío Grandinetti, is the first Argentinean film to compete at Cannes' official selection since 2008 when Pablo Trapero participated with Leonera and Lucrecia Martel with The Headless Woman. 

The Cannes Film Festival also announced the lineup for its Un Certain Regard section in which another Argentinean film will also be competing, Lisandro Alonso's Jauja starring Viggo Mortensen. Additionally, the documentary film The Salt of the Earth about the celebrated Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado will also be screened in the same section. The documentary is directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders and co-directed by Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, the son of the photographer.

The 67th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will take place May 14-25 in France.

Watch the trailer for Damian Szifron's Wild Tales:

MoMA Salutes Ibermedia in its 15th Anniversary

The Museum of Modern Art has announced the film series ‘Iberoamérican Images: The State of Art,' saluting Ibermedia’s 15th Anniversary and presenting nine feature films including a one-week theatrical engagement of Mercedes Moncada's Palabras mágicas (Romper un encantamiento) / Magic Words (Breaking a Spell) (pictured below left). 

Running May 1-14, MoMA’s fourth biannual Ibermedia program is particularly rich, with a number of films that have U.S. distribution and/or a healthy festival run behind them, and a treasure trove of films by filmmakers who seldom get the opportunity to show their work in the U.S. Mercedes Moncada Rodriques’s stunning, heartbreaking Magic Words (Breaking a Spell), which opens the festival with a weeklong run, is perhaps her most accomplished yet. 

For just over 15 years, Ibermedia has been instrumental in the continued ascent of Latin American, Spanish, and Portuguese filmmaking. The intergovernmental Ibermedia organization began with seven member countries; today films from over 20 member countries appear on festival schedules and in cinemas the world over.

Ibermedia facilitates and finances co-productions of documentaries and fiction films between its Spanish- and Portuguese language member countries, and grants money for international distribution and promotion. Professional film organizations from the country sponsoring the proposal select the projects to be helped by the Ibermedia umbrella organization, thus ensuring each project’s autonomy. To date, Ibermedia has supported over600 films and provided training for filmmaking professionals.

Films by promising new talents from Uruguay, Cuba, and Colombia, among others, appear alongside work by seasoned filmmakers like Brazil’s Lucia Murat, capturing a stirring picture of the state of the medium today, in all its variety and splendor. Other films in the lineup include Peruvian film El mudo / The Mute (pictured above left) by Daniel and Diego Vega, Bolivian film Yvy Maraey: Tierra sin mal / Yvy Maraey: Land without Evil (pictured above right) by Juan Carlos Valdivia, and the Mexican film La jaula de oro / The Golden Dream by Diego Quemada-Diez.

Some filmmakers will be present to introduce their films, and on Saturday, May 3 a special screening and round-table discussion takes place at New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center in conjunction with the exhibition.