32nd Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival

As the 32nd Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival headed into its final stretch, Francisco Vargas' "The Violin," Jorge Duran's "Forbidden to Forbid" and Juan Carlos Valdivia's "American Visa" figured as favorites to take top plaudits at Huelva's kudofest.

In his first edition as Huelva fest director, Eduardo Trias put together a strong competition with three lesser-known competish titles also currying good buzz: Alejandro Doria's healing priest drama "The Hands," Santiago Loza's femme friendship story "4 Women, Barefoot," and Chilean Alberto Fuguet's frustrated musician tale "For Rent."

Playing out-of-competish, fest opener, flamenco musical comedy "Por que se frotan las patitas?," went over strongly on its world preem last Saturday.

"Visa" and "Hands" also figure among the six nominations announced at Huelva for best foreign Spanish language film at January's Goya Awards.

Other contenders are Mexican docu "In the Pit," Chile's sex drama "In Bed," Ecuador's road movie "How Much Further" and Colombia's foreign-lingo Oscar candidate "A Ton of Luck."

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Film

The Republic of Poetry by Martín Espada

What sort of place is "The Republic of Poetry"? As portrayed in the title poem of Martín Espada's dynamic eighth collection, it's a place where poets eat for free in restaurants, where "poets rent a helicopter/ to bombard the national palace/ with poems on bookmarks," and where the "the guard at the airport/ will not allow you to leave the country/ until you declaim a poem for her/ and she says Ah! Beautiful."
While such a land might sound like a fanciful literature-loving utopia, what's described here is the very real republic of Chile -- to which the poem is dedicated, and whose culture and recent history provide the lion's share of inspiration for the book. Yet Chile is not the only muse here: The book's three sections provide a triptych of metaphorical "republics" of poetry, including the poetry of elegy -- where both the past and the dead are visited -- and the poetry of protest. Throughout, poetry is shown to bear the power to dissolve, reshape and illuminate the borders of time and place.

Espada, a Brooklyn native whose parents hailed from Puerto Rico, has long been inspired by Latin American poetry (of which he is a widely published translator), and most especially by Chile's most esteemed and extraordinary poet, Pablo Neruda. Today Espada teaches courses on Neruda, along with creative writing classes, as a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. And in his own poetry (for which he has won the American Book Award), he often seems to work in the tradition of Neruda, displaying a vibrant, far-reaching and distinctively openhearted imagination on matters both political and personal.

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Literature

Lower City directed by Sergio Machado

Let's face it, love triangles can be a drag on film. The sex might be diverting but two guys fighting over the same girl (it's almost never the other way round) usually means there's no real love story. The blokes are too busy with their cockfight. It's a phallocentric form.

Lower City is a bit different. It does have both a real (simulated) and metaphoric cockfight, but it also encompasses three corners of a bruising and compelling love story. It's a brilliantly fresh, immediate and intimate film from a young Brazilian director who is announcing his arrival. It's also quite sexy.

Sergio Machado is 38, from Bahia, the most African of the Brazilian states.

He has worked with Walter Salles since being recommended by the great novelist Jorge Amado, whose books made Bahia famous. Salles (who made The Motorcycle Diaries) produced Lower City, which is set mostly in Salvador, the Bahian capital.

Read More

The trailer is available here.
Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Film

In the National Board of Review Awards, held yesterday, Pedro Almodovar's "Volver", which swept the European Film Awards at the start of the week, won best foreign language film.
Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Film

reading others' words

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel as seen by edify. Babel is a difficult and challenging experience, and doubt I'll ever watch it again, but I don't really need to; it stays with you and never lets go.

***
DC's found some Juan Goytisolo's fans, quoting Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Edmund White and Orhan Pamuk.

***
Mantex on Alejo Carpentier - His literary style is a wonderful combination of dazzling images and a rich language, full of the technical jargon of whatever subject he touches on - be it music, architecture, painting, history, or agriculture.

Please visit SPLALit aStore

Almodovar's colors

An article about Viva Pedro! festival, a retrospective of Almodovar's films, and the predominance of Red

Attending this month's Pedro Almodovar film festival will have you seeing red.

Not from anger, disillusionment or disappointment. Far from it.

Literal red. The brilliant Spanish director's movies are awash in the color, symbolically used to evoke revenge, murder and, most of all, passion.

In "The Flower of My Secret," a woman's sexy red dress at once captures her physical desire and her bottomless desperation. In "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," a scorned woman's smart red pantsuit signals her determination to get even.

In "Matador," a fantastic yet overlooked thriller, the action culminates with lovers completing a murder-suicide pact, their nude bodies collapsing onto a bed of crimson bullfighter's capes at the moment a solar eclipse turns the Castillian countryside the shade of blood.

The bold use of color is just one of the many stylistic ticks you pick up when you watch Almodovar's best films back to back. And that's what makes Cinema 21's two-week Viva Pedro! festival particularly enticing. The double-feature screenings that begin Friday (and precede the Dec. 22 opening of Almodovar's latest, "Volver") span two decades of work, pairing the director's hits with lesser-known rarities. Seeing these eight films during the course of days, not years, you notice artistic brushstrokes and recurring themes that might otherwise get lost.

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Film

Lola Alvarez Bravo by Elizabeth Ferrer

Lola Alvarez Bravo did not set out to be the "first woman photographer" of Mexico, but that is how she is remembered today. Wife of Mexico's leading photojournalist Manuel Alvarez Bravo, her influence extends to the latest generation of Mexico's female photographers, many of whom studied under her tutelage. Bravo's contribution is now being acknowledged through an assessment of her work by scholar Elizabeth Ferrer titled Lola Alvarez Bravo.
(...)
As photographer, educator, and curator Bravo traveled the country documenting rural areas, indigenous people, and cultural traditions. Her imagery was inspired by "frolicking," she said - a playful description that typifies her approach to her subjects.

Colleagues such as surrealist painters Frida Kahlo and Marie Izquierdo, as well as visits from acclaimed French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson, encouraged her to weave both surreal and traditional elements into her work.

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Mexican Photography

Alfaguara Prize 2007 Jury

Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa will preside to the jury of the 10th edition of the Alfaguara Prize 2007. Like in previous editions, the composition of the rest of the jury will not become public until the award is announced.
From his first edition in 1998, outstanding writers have presided over the Jury of the Alfaguara Prize: Carlos Fuentes, Eduardo Mendoza, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Jorge Semprún, Luis Mateo Ten, Jose Saramago, Manuel Caballero Bonald and Angeles Mastretta.
The Alfaguara Prize is one of the most important literary awards in Spanish language.
Previously awarded authors include, last year's winner Peruvian Santiago Roncagliolo with Abril Rojo, Graciela Montes, Ema Wolf, Laura Restrepo, Xavier Velasco, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Elena Poniatowska, Clara Sánchez, Manuel Vicent.
Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Literature, Spanish Literature

Interview with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

An interview with Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu about his last film "Babel", which is tipped for an Oscar.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has become one of the most acclaimed directors in Hollywood with just three films - Amores Perros, 21 Grams and, now, Babel, perhaps the film he's received the most press for and one that will likely lead him to an Oscar nomination for best director. Part of the recent wave of Mexican directors, including Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron, Inarritu is a part of a new era of filmmakers who are willing to challenge viewers to see something new in the medium. As great as Perros and Grams were, Babel is Inarritu's first masterpiece, a fascinating dissection of culture, communication, and crisis in the new millennium.

What attracted studios to Babel

I don't know. I think maybe the [studio] people are tired to be making the same kinds of films. They feel that there's something, that maybe they can bet on some elements. Maybe they feel like the package makes sense and they trust in the elements, like the story, the director, the actors, and the way I pitched them. And, I presented them in a way that they trust. I think all of these people, maybe as you are, are bored, of doing and seeing the same thing. So, I gather that's what drives them, kind of the curiosity about this film.

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Film

Carlos Fuentes presents his new book

Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes in an interview to El Tiempo talks about is new book 'Todas las familias felices' (All the happy families). This work is a collection of 16 short stories connected by the presence of a choir remembering the ancient Greek tragedies. About this new book Fuentes tells us that "Each one of this stories tells histories of families, of relationships between man and woman, father and sons, lovers. But they are histories of families who I did not want to remove them from a more collective context. So the choir comes to be the collective voice, the one of without voice. This unites the family stories and gives a greater social resonance to them.

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Latin American Literature

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

A 2002 interview with Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo.

Except for a scattering of dream fragments and apocalyptic fantasies, State of Siege, Juan Goytisolo's eighth novel to be published in the U.S., begins reasonably conventionally. About a quarter of the way through, though, a major in the International Mediation Force, stationed in a Sarajevo-like city under siege, realizes that a letter he is reading "correspond[s] word for word to the contents of the first pages of the present book." From then on in it's all Russian dolls and Chinese boxes, a labyrinth of texts within texts that would have dizzied Borges. Goytisolo's narrative contortionism is not mere postmodern showmanship, but precisely the point—that the reader, like the inhabitants of the besieged city, is "caught in the rattrap," cornered in an epistemological purgatory in which "Reality has been transmuted into fiction: the horror tale of our daily existence!"
Goytisolo, the 71-year-old author of over a dozen novels, is widely considered Spain's finest living writer—somewhat ironically, as he left Franco's Spain in 1956, living in self-imposed exile in Paris and North Africa ever since, where he has remained a harsh critic of contemporary Spanish society. He first visited Sarajevo during the summer of 1993, as a correspondent for El País. The result was his "Sarajevo Notebook" (published here in 2000 as part of the collection Landscapes of War), a series of impressionistic reports describing the horrors of the siege and attacking the international community's non-interventionist policy for its cowardice and hypocrisy. He returned in January 1994 and found that "the situation was more horrible than the first time. It was winter and the cold was terrible." The Serb bombardment of the city was constant. "It was impossible for me to write a second 'Sarajevo Notebook,' " says Goytisolo on the phone from his home in Marrakech, "but my impression was so horrible that I thought that the only way to answer this situation was through literature, and to oppose the truth of fiction to the lies of propaganda."

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Spanish Literature

Books of the year

The season for the Books of the Year lists is here, and here's the SPLALit selection from the New Statesman list.

Andrey Kurkov

Ruben Gallego's White on Black : a boy's story (John Murray) is an incredible and moving autobiographical novel of a handicapped son of famous Spanish communists who was abandoned in a Soviet special institution for children.

Jonathan Meades

The Moldavian Pimp (Harvill) sketches tango, brothels, Jewish sex traffickers and Buenos Aires in the 1920s. Cozarinsky's shadowy novella is preoccupied with the way that any attempt to exhume this ignominious history - or any other history - is impaired by the accretion of all previous attempts and by the ghosts of those who strayed into the territory.

You can find the full list here

Please visit SPLALit aStore