As part of the festivities of the 20th anniversary of Cinema Tropical, the organization presents “TropiChat 20,” a special series of twenty weekly conversations with key Latin American and U.S. Latinx directors and film professionals.
The series kicked off on Tuesday, April 6 with a special conversation with Martín Rejtman, who is one of the key figures of the New Argentine Cinema of the late nineties and early aughts, a major source of inspiration and insight for the Latin American film renaissance that followed.
Co-presented by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University (CLACS); powered by Pirotecnia Films.
Special thanks to Irazú Sánchez Villalobos, Manu Guerrero, and Juan Pedro Agurcia.
Past Conversations:
Federico Veiroj
Wednesday, July 7, 7pm EDT
With five full-length feature films and a handful of short works, Uruguayan director Federico Veiroj has managed to compile an altogether distinctive, fascinating cinematographic oeuvre. Born and raised in Montevideo, he graduated in Social Communications from the Catholic University of Montevideo. In 2008, he co-produced and directed his first feature, Acné, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. His other directing credits include A Useful Life (2010), The Apostate (2015), Belmonte (2018), and The Moneychanger (2019). His work has screened at numerous international film festivals including Cannes, Rotterdam, San Sebastian, Toronto, New York, Morelia, and Mar del Plata.
Dominga Sotomayor
Wednesday, June 16, 7pm EDT
Dominga Sotomayor studied Audiovisual Directing at Universidad Católica de Chile, and a Masters in Directing at ESCAC in Barcelona. She developed her first feature Thursday till Sunday at the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence. The film won the Tiger Award in Rotterdam in 2012 and was screened in more than a hundred festivals. In 2013 she co-directed The Island, that also won the Tiger. In 2015 she premiered her mid-length Mar at Berlinale Forum, and the collective film Here in Lisbon produced by Indielisboa. Her 2018 film Too Late to Die Young had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Golden Leopard for Best Director, marking a first for a female filmmaker in the festival’s history. Her newest film project, the omnibus film The Year of the Everlasting Storm will premiere at Cannes this July.
She has worked in videos and photographs for visual art exhibitions, like Little Sun (Olafur Eliasson, 2012) at the Tate Modern in London. In 2009 she co-founded Cinestación, a leading production company based in Santiago where she produces auteur filmmaking in Latin-America. Recently, she has been involved in Los Fuertes, by Omar Zúñiga, Murder me, Monster, by Alejandro Fadel, premiered at Un Certain Regard in Cannes 2018, and Raging Helmets, by Neto Villalobos. She also co-founded CCC, Centro de Cine y Creación, a cultural centre and arthouse cinema which opened in Santiago de Chile in 2019.
Matías Piñeiro
June 9, 2021
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1982. Matías Piñeiro earned a filmmaking degree from Universidad del Cine. His award-winning films have been screened around the world, including at Anthology Film Archives, Festival des 3 Continents, the Locarno Film Festival, the Berlinale, the London Film Festival, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, the Museum of Modern Art, Rencontré Cinémas d’Amerique Latine de Toulouse, the New York Film Festival, and the Viennale.
In 2007 he made his debut feature film, The Stolen Man / El hombre robado, followed by They All Lie / Todos mienten in 2009. He has spent the last decade working on “The Shakespeareads”, a series of films focusing on Shakespeare’s female characters: Rosalind (2010), Viola (2012) The Princess of France / La Princesa de Francia (2014), Hermia & Helena (2016), and Isabella (2020). He also teaches film at the Pratt Institute in New York, at Le Fresnoy in France and the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastián as well as being curator of the Punto de Vista Film Festival in Pamplona.
Kleber Mendonça Filho
May 26, 2021
Kleber Mendonça Filho began his career as a film critic and journalist, writing for newspapers and magazines, as well as for his own site, CinemaScópio. As a director, he experimented with fiction, documentary, and video clips in the 1990s. He migrated from video to digital and 35 mm film in the 2000s. Over the course of that decade, he made several short films, including 2002’s A Menina do Algodão (codirected by Daniel Bandeira), as well as a feature-length documentary, 2008’s Crítico.
Neighboring Sounds (2013) was Mendonça’s first feature-length drama, and it won numerous awards. A. O. Scott of the New York Times included it in his list of the ten best films of 2012. Since then, Mendonça’s films (including his latest, Bacurau, co-directed with Juliano Dornelles) have received more than 120 awards in Brazil and abroad, with selections in festivals such as New York, Copenhagen, and Cannes. He has also served as a film programmer for the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation.
Natalia Almada
May 12, 2021
Recipient of the 2012 MacArthur “Genius” Award, Natalia Almada combines artistic expression with social inquiry to make films that are both personal reflections and critical social commentaries. Her work straddles the boundaries of documentary, fiction, and experimental film. Her most recent film Users had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Directing Award U..S. Documentary. Her previous film Todo lo demás / Everything Else is a narrative feature starring Academy Award-nominated Adriana Barraza; it premiered at the New York Film Festival and was nominated for a Mexican Academy Award.
El Velador premiered at the 2011 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and broadcast on the award-winning PBS program POV, along with her other two feature documentaries Al Otro Lado and El General. Almada’s short film All Water Has a Perfect Memory premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and received the Best Documentary Short award at the Tribeca Film Festival. Almada was the recipient of the 2009 Best Documentary Director Award at the Sundance Film Festival and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, USA Artists, The Herb Alpert Foundation, and MacDowell Colony. Almada graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives between Mexico City and San Francisco.
Lourdes Portillo
May 5, 2021
Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and raised in Los Angeles, Lourdes Portillo has been making award-winning films about Latin American, Mexican, and Chicano/a experiences and social justice issues for nearly thirty years. Since her first film, After the Earthquake / Después del terremoto (1979), she has produced and directed over a dozen works that reveal her signature hybrid style as a visual artist, investigative journalist, and activist. Portillo’s seventeen completed films include the Academy Award and Emmy Award nominated Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (1986), La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1988), Columbus on Trial (1992), The Devil Never Sleeps (1994), Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (1999), Señorita Extraviada (2001), My McQueen (2004), Al Más Allá (2008), and her new short film animated film State of Grace (2020). In 2017 she was recipient of the IDA Career Achievement Award.
Martín Rejtman
April 6, 2021
*Presented as part of the 6th edition of Neighboring Scenes, in partnership with Film at Lincoln Center
“A graduate of New York University’s influential film program, Rejtman anticipated the wave of film school-trained directors who would play such an important role in the reinvention of Argentine cinema. With his first feature, Rapado, Rejtman made an assertive break from the political orientation shaping much of Argentine cinema in the wake of the nation’s long, dark years of dictatorship. An assuredly meticulous, offbeat comedy about apathetic, drifting youth, Rapado pointed towards a deliberately minor cinema more engaged with the paradoxes of Argentina’s neoliberal present than the tangled legacies of its past. The popular and critical success of his subsequent films – the droll and wonderfully deadpan comedies Silvia Prieto and The Magic Gloves – cemented his reputation as the preeminent artist of the nuevo cine argentina with their wry and affectionately subtle satires of not quite young and not quite professional urbanites.
Rejtman is the only contemporary Argentine director to maintain a parallel career as a writer, with several celebrated collections of short stories to his name. Animated by a rich dialogue between literary and cinematic form, the epigrammatic logic and crystalline prose refined by Rejtman’s stories inspire and, in turn, are inspired by the elegant restraint of his films. An important touchstone for Rejtman is classical Hollywood cinema, and especially the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s for which Rejtman has professed a great love and admiration. Indeed, like the screwball comedy, Rejtman’s cinema defines a delightfully unstable world governed entirely by its own internal logic in which the seemingly inconsequential is treated with the utmost seriousness and non-sequiturs unfold profound truths – in which identities and everyday objects circulate dizzily, gathering unexpected meaning and value along the way. Gentle yet astute satires of love in the age of the free market, Silvia Prieto and The Magic Gloves are each masterpieces of the miniature that reveal a philosophical adroitness and sophistication extremely rare in film comedy today. Most recently Rejtman has successfully turned to nonfiction with two entrancing documentaries, Copacabana and Entertainment for Actors that – until now – remain regretfully unseen in the United States.” —Harvard Film Archive
