Discovering Latin America Film Festival
The 3rd Discovering Latin America Film Festival runs from Thursday 25th November to Sunday 5th December 2004.
Hot on the heels of the 14th Latin America Film Festival, which was held in London in November, comes the 3rd Discovering Latin America Film Festival, featuring films from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and many other Latin American countries. Far from repeating the line up of films in the earlier festival, the Discovering Latin America Film Festival offers a completely different programme of films for audiences in London. With the recent success of The Motorcycle Diaries and other Latin American-related films such as Amores Perros and City of God, this year's festival is perfectly timed to showcase the best that Latin American cinema has to offer, and to generate a greater awareness and interest in Latin American culture. The festival is organised by Discovering Latin America, an organisation that promotes Latin American culture and raises money for charities that help Latin American communities. The festival takes place at a number of venues in Central London, including the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Ritzy cinema, the Odeon Cinemas in Covent Garden and Panton Street and the Latin American Bureau (LAB).
Appropriately, the festival features a screening of The Motorcycle Diaries, along with other popular Latin American film successes like Bus 174 and El Bonaerense. As well as showing films that have already gained a high profile in the UK, the festival also contains work by new Latin American filmmakers, as well as providing retrospectives of films by well-known directors. A number of films will be receiving their UK cinema premieres at the festival, including The House In Front, a drama set in post war Guatemala; Moebius, a science fiction thriller about a missing train and its passengers, and Taxi, an Encounter, in which a young man who steals a taxi and poses as a taxi driver gets more than he bargained for when he picks up a young woman in his taxi.
Although it has a roster of strong feature films titles, the festival's is undoubtedly dominated by its many documentaries, which explore a number of facets of Latin American culture, history and politics. Among the documentaries getting their first screening in the UK are Cardboard Days, which concerns people who look for rubbish on the streets of Buenos Aires to sell and live on the money they make; Carandiru.doc, a film about the making of the feature film Carandiru, and 3 Minutes, where we follow the lives of four very different women in Buenos Aires. There are also a series of gala nights scheduled throughout the festival. To open the festival, there's a Gala screening of Familia Rodante, where a family sets out on a weekend long trip to a wedding, while other gala films include The First Night, where a peasant family find themselves trying to survive on the streets in the midst of guerrilla warfare; the aforementioned The Motorcycle Diaries, the story of a young Che Guevara and his friend Alberto Grannados as they journey all over Latin America; The Truce, a sex comedy about a middle-aged man falling for a much younger woman.
A Social Genocide, the latest work by Argentinean director Fernando "Pino" Salinas, is also receiving a Gala screening, and the director will be in attendance at this screening for an interview. Other films by Salinas, including his epic The Hour of the Furnaces, can also be seen at the festival as part of a retrospective of the director's work. In addition, two other noted documentary filmmakers will also be receiving retrospectives at the festival. They are Francisco Lombardi from Peru, who directed Don't Tell Anyone and What the Eye Doesn't See, and Jorge Sanjinés from Bolivia, director of And So It Is and Sons of the Last Garden. Also, the late Brazilian director Rogerio Sganzerla will have a screening of his film Red Light Bandit, which will be attended by his wife, Helena Ignez.
For those who want to discover more about Latin American cinema, a number of the screenings will feature presentations by - and Q&A sessions with - directors, producers and actors. For a detailed look at Latin American filmmaking trends and techniques, there are also three Masterclasses taking place at the ICA. Oscar Nominated Cinematographer Cesar Charlone will be discussing Cinematography in Latin American Cinema, Argentine composer Mariano Nuñez is focusing on Music in Latin American Cinema and Professor Michael Chanan will be examining The Auteurist Tradition in Contemporary Latin Cinema . With a wide range of screenings and events, the festival has something for everyone and promises to be an excellent showcase for some of the best Latin American cinema.
For more details visit: www.discovering-latinamerica.org.uk
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