2007 Sundance Film Festival - Latin American Films

The Sundance Institute has announced the line-up of 64 films selected for the Independent Film and World Cinema Competitions for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

This edition has a strong Latin American presence, between the selected films we find:

Acidente / Brazil directed by Cao Guimaraes and Pablo Lobato
Experimental in form, this lush cinematic poem weaves together stories and images from twenty different cities in the state of Menas Gerais, Brazil, to reveal the fundamental role the accidental and the unpredictable play in everyday human life.

Bajo Juarez, The City Devouring Its Daughters / Mexico directed by Alejandra Sanchez
In an industrial town in Mexico near the US border, hundreds of women have been sexually abused and murdered. As the body count continues to rise, a web of corruption unfolds that reaches the highest levels of Mexican society.

Cocalero / Bolivia directed by Alejandro Landes)
Set against the backdrop of the Bolivian government's attempted eradication of the coca crop and oppression of the indigenous groups that cultivate it and the American war on drugs, an Aymara Indian named Evo Morales travels through the Andes and the Amazon in jeans and sneakers, leading a historic campaign to become the first indigenous president of Bolivia.

Drained (O Cheiro Do Ralo) / Brazil directed by Heitor Dhalia; Screenwriters: Marcal Aquino, Heitor Dhalia)
A pawn shop proprietor buys used goods from desperate locals - as much to play perverse power games as for his own livelihood, but when the perfect rump and a backed-up toilet enter his life, he loses all control.

The Night Buffalo (El Bufalo De La Noche) / Mexico directed by Jorge Hernandez Aldana; Screenwriters: Jorge Hernandez Aldana, Guillermo Arriaga
A 22-year-old schizophrenic commits suicide after his girlfriend cheats on him with his best friend. Before killing himself, he lays out a plan that will drive the lovers into an abyss of madness.

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Pan's Labyrinth directed by Guillermo del Toro

Mexican film-makers are currently in the ascendant, working together and abroad. The year opened with Tommy Lee Jones's modern western, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, scripted by Guillermo Arriaga. Alfonso Cuaron's British dystopian thriller Children of Men is still running. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel (scripted by Arriaga) will be released in January. And Guillermo del Toro's remarkable Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno), which Cuaron has produced, appears this week. It's del Toro's sixth film, and his best to date, and like the others it's a horror movie though much less of a genre picture than his Hollywood output.

His previous Spanish film, The Devil's Backbone (2001), was set towards the end of the Civil War at a remote orphanage, and the events - which include the terrible brutality of Franco's troops and a ghost that issues warnings of forthcoming catastrophe - are seen through the eyes of a sensitive young boy. We inevitably think of an earlier Spanish movie, Victor Erice's masterly Spirit of the Beehive, which takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Pan's Labyrinth is set six years or so later, in 1944, very precisely in June when news of the Allied invasion of Normandy arrives in an authoritarian state where a party of left-wing guerrillas, the last remnants of the Republican army, are hiding out in the mountains.

They are, perhaps fortunately, unaware that Franco will remain dictator for a further 30 years. Hunting them down is a detachment of soldiers led by Captain Vidal, brilliantly played by the handsome, menacing Sergi Lopez, best known in this country for playing the psychopathic killer in Dominik Moll's Harry, He's Here To Help and the evil head porter of a London hotel in Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things. Vidal is a ruthless sadist, an archetypal fascist bully trying to live up to the expectations of his father, a military hero killed in North Africa. This would be an exciting thriller in itself, but there is another story of a quite different kind.

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Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende

Once upon a time, Isabel Allende was the doyenne of the weird and wondrous, the heiress to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's kingdom of magical realism. With early novels and short story collections such as "Of Love and Shadows" and "Eva Luna," and particularly her first novel, "The House of the Spirits," the Chilean writer proved herself one of the very few writers capable of following in Garcia Marquez's capacious footsteps, adding her name to the long list of remarkable fabulists from Latin America.

In recent years, though, Allende has turned her back on the literary style that brought her to the dance, preferring a more accessible but significantly less appealing method of historical adventure, of which "Ines of My Soul" is the latest installment. Allende's take on the historical novel in "Ines of My Soul" is solid, well-constructed and entirely arid. The effortless mystery and charm of "The House of the Spirits" are entirely lacking from the pages of "Ines," which seems to be written by a different writer altogether.

"Ines of My Soul" purports to be the last testament of Ines Suarez, a real-life 16th century Spaniard who was among the first Europeans to journey to present-day Chile. Inés is a seamstress and cook in the Spanish city of Plasencia who travels to the New World to chase after her feckless husband, Juan de Malaga. Once she arrives, she learns that Juan is dead, but discovers an entire world of opportunity for a capable woman. Aligning herself with the ambitious, ruthless soldier and politician Pedro de Valdivia, and through her erotic affiliations, her political skill, and her native-born compassion for her constituents, European and Indian, Inés becomes a gobernadora in a Chile still undergoing the bloody process of birthing itself.

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Interview with Guillermo del Toro

Mythical underworld beasts clash with the real-life monsters of fascism in Guillermo del Toro’s new film. Seen through the eyes of Ofelia, a lonely young girl caught up in the brutal aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth is the most ambitious work yet by the Mexican writer- director of Cronos and Hellboy. Fusing historical drama with horror film, magical realism with political allegory, Del Toro’s eighth film is that rarest of hybrids: a fairytale for adults.

“A fable is a good way to address issues as opposed to addressing them purely as a war movie in a big, selfimportant way,” says the 42-year-old director. “To me, fascism is the moment when all your choices are removed. You are given one single choice to align to, but the idea of the fable is that choice is what makes you free. That’s a very simple parable for me, and the best way to do that was a fairytale. There was something incredibly attractive in creating a world full of creatures and monsters, but making the human characters much more monstrous than them.”

This is not the first time Del Toro has used the Spanish Civil War as a backdrop for a supernatural tale of childhood innocence. His 2001 ghost story, The Devil’s Backbone, drew on the same historical hinterland. Now a part-time resident of Madrid, the director grew up besotted with Spanish literature, cinema and comics. The civil war brought “a fascism that was agreed to be overlooked by the world”. This struck a personal chord in Mexico, where exiled film-makers such as Luis Buñuel fled Franco.

“Mexico is one of the few countries that, during the civil war period, was politically supportive of the Republican side,” Del Toro says. “Many people exiled from Spain to Mexico were extremely influential in the arts — actors, directors, production designers. Many became good friends of mine growing up. I heard things about the war that I didn’t read in For Whom the Bell Tolls, heh heh! It was not a grand adventure of macho bravado. It was a much more human, compelling, brutal and small drama.”

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Interview with Antonio Banderas

Interview with Antonio Banderas' on his second experience as a director "El Camino de los Ingleses" (The English Path).

Antonio Banderas' second turn as a director is a far cry from cinematic romps like "The Mask of Zorro," "Spy Kids" or the other box-office hits which made him a household acting name.
Instead, he's created a chronicle about the bewildering path to manhood in Spain.
"It's my age!" one of Spain's biggest international film stars told a news conference. "I'm becoming more pensive and I can imagine myself better behind a camera than in front of it."
The Spanish language film tells the story of a group of teenage boys on the threshold of maturity, their loves and conflicts as they try to understand their transition to adults.
Banderas says the movie is an attempt to bring something more personal and risky to the big screen, but also to provide a springboard for a new generation of local actors in Malaga, his home city in southern Spain.

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Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda has won the 2006 Cervantes Prize

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Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's top literary award.(...)
Gamoneda, 76, inherited his love for literature from his father, a known modernist writer. His first published work was a collection of poems, "Sublevacion inmovil" ("Still Uprising"), in 1960. His biggest success came in the late 1980s, when his book, "Edad," was awarded the Spanish national Poetry Prize.

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Founded in 1976 by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Cervantes prize, carrying a 90,180 euros (108,000 U.S. dollars) cash award, is presented to the writer whose Castilian language work as a whole is judged to have most enriched the Spanish literary canon.
On Thursday, Gamoneda also received the Queen Sofia Ibero-Americana Poetry Prize at a ceremony in Madrid's Royal Palace. It had been "an overwhelming day for me", he said.
The Ibero-American prize carries a 42,000-euro (50,000 dollars) cash award and is presented to living authors whose work is relevant to all Ibero-American nations, and includes both Spanish language and Portuguese writing.
Gamoneda is one of the significant contemporary Spanish language poets. He was born in Oviedo in 1931 and has lived in Leon since 1934.
His work includes 1960's Sublevacion Inmovil (The Motionless Revolt), 1979's Leon de la Mirada (The Look of Leon), 1982's Blues Castellano (Spanish Language Blues), 1995's Libro de los Venenos (The Poison Book) and 2003's Arden las Perdidas (The Losses Burn).

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Gamoneda, 76, who was born in the northern city of Oviedo, inherited his love for literature from his father, a known modernist writer in literary circles. His first published work was a collection of poems, ''Sublevacion inmovil'' (''Still Uprising''), in 1960. Themes of pain, memory and darkness define his work.
''Blues Castellano'' was published in 1982 and was translated into several languages, but his biggest success came in the late 1980s, when his book, ''Edad,'' was awarded the Spanish national Poetry Prize.
Gamoneda has also translated works by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and France's Mallarme into Spanish.

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The National Prize for Spanish Letters

Raul Guerra Garrido, known for novels set in Spain's Basque region, has won one of the country's most prestigious literary prizes, the Culture Ministry said Monday.

The National Prize for Spanish Letters recognizes the literary achievements of a Spanish author over the course of a career. The award, considered the most important national literary accolade after the Cervantes Prize, carries a cash stipend of more than €30,000 (US$40,000).

Born in Madrid in 1935, Guerra Garrido completed undergraduate and doctorate degrees in pharmaceutical studies. He later moved to the country's northern Basque region, where he opened a pharmacy and began his literary career, writing both traditional and suspense novels.

His 1987 novel, "La Mar es Mala Mujer" (The Sea is a Bad Woman) was made into a motion picture. Other works include "El Otono Siempre Hiere" (Autumn Always Hurts) and "La Gran Via es New York" (The Gran Via is New York).

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The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas

Review of Javier Cercas' The Speed of Light

Javier Cercas made his name writing about the moral confusion of warfare. Soldiers of Salamis(2003) saw him penetrate deep into the psychology of the Spanish Civil War. The novel, currently available in 15 languages, saw its author decorated by literary-prize judges across the world. Now he has an international platform from which to launch this very timely book: a European novel about the personal fall-out from the Vietnam war, published in the same month that the 43rd American President has conceded parallels between the Asian conflict he avoided and the Middle Eastern one he instigated.

The Speed of Light begins in the 1980s. Our likeably pretentious hero graduates from the cynical young bohemianism of Barcelona to an unexpected job offer from an American university in Urbana, Illinois. He aspires to literary success. But he doesn't know how to play the American sophisticate. We cringe for his wrongness, his attention-seeking gaucheness.

On his first night, two of his new colleagues ask him for his view on the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. "Like everyone," he confesses, decades later, "I think I liked Almodóvar's films back then, but at that moment I must have felt an irresistible urge to try to sound interesting or make my cosmopolitan vocation very clear by setting myself apart from those stories of drug-addled nuns, traditional transvestites and matador murderers, so I answered, 'Frankly I think they're a pile of queer crap.' " There's a burst of savage laughter. The joke is on his homophobia. The men he is talking to are gay.

And our hero doesn't learn his lesson there. When he meets Rodney Falk, the lumbering Vietnam veteran with whom he will share an office, Falk asks for his view on Ernest Hemingway. "Frankly," he tells Falk, who is a Hemingway fan, "I think he's shit."

Despite this inauspicious beginning, the room-mates become friends, sitting twice weekly in a bar trading views on writers and writing. Falk's pronouncements become central to the young European's world view. Falk does not talk about his time in Asia, but his experiences of humanity at its least humane add weird weight to everything he says.

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Interview with Guillermo del Toro

No sooner had he finished shooting his first film than the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro was wanted by the police.

Guillermo del Toro: 'There is a moment in everyone's life when they have the chance to be immortal'
He had closed his production offices, seemingly in a hurry, and a few days later his fellow tenants had reported a disagreeable aroma seeping through his locked door. It was the smell of rotting flesh. And they knew this fanatical young filmmaker had a fascination with death.

"They thought it was a decomposing body," smiles the 41-year-old director. "And I suppose in some sense it was. The Cronos machine [a device in the movie that bestows immortality upon its owner] was partly mechanical but also comprised a living organism, so to make it look right we used real bits of offal. When I went away, I forgot to clean it out; it really stank."

Thankfully for del Toro, the police were satisfied with his explanation, leaving him free to release first the odour and then his film, Cronos. A surreal and chilling re-imagining of a vampire tale, it proved just as potent as the odour, quickly establishing his reputation as a promising and unusual writer-director. The film won the Critics' Prize at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival before going on to scoop nine Mexican Academy Awards.

Since then, del Toro has made films both inside and outside the Hollywood system, He has had varying degrees of commercial success with his studio projects, from the spluttering Mimic to the soaring Blade II and Hellboy, while winning universal praise for all his Spanish-language films. This month he adds to that canon with Pan's Labyrinth – a dark and intoxicating blend of wartime drama and gothic fairy tale.

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Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende

Washington Post's review of Isabel Allende's Ines of My Soul.

Isabel Allende's new novel, Ines of My Soul , the 15th book she has published in just over two decades, is in many ways her most ambitious. It is historical fiction, set in Spain, Peru (where she was born) and Chile (where she grew up) in the 16th century, the time of the Spanish conquest of Central and South America, one of the bloodiest periods in human history. Its central character is an actual historical figure, Ines Suarez, "widow of the Most Excellent Gobernador don Rodrigo de Quiroga, conquistador and founder of the kingdom of Chile." She is living in Santiago and is more or less 70 years old -- she doesn't know the exact date of her birth, probably in 1507, in Spain, "in Plasencia, in the north of Extremadura, a border city steeped in war and religion" -- and she is looking back on her life in the certain knowledge that her death cannot be far away. (...)

The trouble with that story, in this novel as in many others that have been written about the Spanish conquest, is that while it may seem heroic from the Spanish point of view, it is anything but heroic from the viewpoint of the indigenous people who were slaughtered, enslaved and otherwise broken to the will of Charles I of Spain and his ambitious, ruthless emissaries.

To say this isn't merely to indulge in present-day political correctness, though perhaps there is a bit of that. The unpleasant historical truth is that the Spanish conquest was an atrocity of almost unimaginable dimensions, carried out by the likes of Francisco Pizarro and Hernando Cortes. Though Allende does not attempt to whitewash the conquistadors -- Pizarro is "a man of about sixty, haughty, with sallow skin, a graying beard, sunken eyes with a suspicious gleam in them, and a disagreeable falsetto voice" -- she cannot resist the temptation to romanticize the feats of the men (and, in this instance, one remarkable woman) who conquered a continent.

The temptation is understandable. In Chile, as in Mexico and Peru, the suppression of the natives -- the Mapuche, the Incas, the Aztecs -- was carried out by extraordinarily small bodies of soldiers who fought against astonishing odds: a hundred men or fewer against thousands. Thus the expedition that set out from Cuzco in southern Peru in January 1540 was "a pathetic group: only eleven soldiers in addition to Pedro de Valdivia -- and me, for I was prepared to wield a sword if the occasion demanded it."

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The Mexican film "El violín" (the violin) directed by Francisco Vargas Quevedo, won the Colón de Oro of the XXXII Latin American Festival of Huelva (Spain). "El violín" features Angel Tavira, Dagoberto Gama, Fermín Martinez and Gerald Taracena, tells the history of Plutarco, his son Genaro and his grandson Lucio, who take a double life, since, on one hand, they are humble rural musicians and, by another one, actively support to the guerrilla movement of the farmers against the opressing government.
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Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

A man, whose name is not revealed until half the novel, goes to Comala to pay a promise made to his mother on her death bed: to find his father and claim what is theirs. The story of Juan's experience, his search for identity and his heritage, is interwoven with the tale of his father, Pedro Paramo.

Pedro Paramo dominates the landscape of the novel which flows hynotically through dreams, desires and memories. The novel propels the reader down a dusty forgotten road to a town of death, a place populated by ghosts and living memories.

Juan Rulfo's extraordinarily powerful novel, Pedro Paramo, captures the essence of life in rural Mexico during the last years of the 19th century, and the beginning of the 20th.

Buy Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo at Amazon.com
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