MoMA's Doc Fortnight Will Show THE TINIEST PLACE; EL FIELD and ARGENTINIAN LESSON

The Museum of Modern Art announced the lineup of their annual Documentary Fortnight Festival which will feature three Latin American films including Tatiana Huezo's acclaimed debut feature El lugar más pequeño / The Tiniest Place (pictured) as opening film -along with Jim Hubbard's United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The film is the account of the village of Cinquera in El Salvador, where the surviving residents restore the village and their lives after the brutal Civil War of 1980–1992. The Mexican filmmaker will be in attendance to introduce and participate in a post-screening Q&A.

MoMA will also present the US premieres of the Mexican film El Field directed by Daniel Rosas and the Polish film Argentinian Lesson by Wojciech Staroń. Rosas' film, shot in California's Imperial Valley and Mexico's Mexicali Valley, illustrates the contrasts between field and desert, urban and countryside, and men and machine. El Field presents cross-border relationships as a stunning, complex, and often chaotic symbiosis. Argentinian Lesson tells the story of Janek, a young Polish boy, is thrust into an unknown world when his family moves to Argentina.

These three films will be co-presented by Ambulante, the celebrated traveling documentary film festival created by Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, and Pablo Cruz; and Cinema Tropical. Established in 2001, MoMA's annual two-week showcase of recent nonfiction film and media takes place each February. This international selection of films present a wide range of creative categories that extend the idea of the documentary form, examines the relationship between contemporary art and nonfiction filmmaking, and reflects on new areas of nonfiction practice.

Two Chilean Films Win Prizes at Sundance

Chilean cinema had a stellar performance at this year's Sundance Film Festival receiving two of the main prizes. Andrés Wood's Violeta se fue a los cielos / Violeta Went to Heaven, about the life of folksinger Violeta Parra who became a pop culture icon and her songs protested social injustice, won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic. Wood follows on the footsteps of Chilean film La nana / The Maid by Sebastián Silva which won the same prize exactly three years ago.

The other prize awarded to a Chilean production went to Marialy Rivas, Camila Gutiérrez and Pedro Peirano who received the World Cinema Screenwriting Award, Dramatic for Loca y alocada / Young & Wild, the film directed by Rivas. "Do you want to cry? Me too. We grew up in a country during the dictatorship," said Rivas accepting the prize at the awards ceremony. "Since I was seven I wanted to be a filmmaker to escape that violent reality. Every film is an act of love."

These two awards add to the one previously announced for Chilean filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor. As it was reported earlier this week, she received the Sundance Institute / Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award.

Pictured: Camila Gutiérrez and Marialy Rivas at the Sundance Awards ceremony. Jury member Richard Peña on the background.

The Highest Grossing Latin American Films of 2011

Few days ago, news portal LatAmcinema.com, published a special report with the highest grossing local films of 2011 for some Latin American countries, which happened to be mostly comedies. According to information offered by the publication, the most successful film from Argentina was Un cuento chino / Chinese Take-Away, directed by Sebastián Borensztein and starring Ricardo Darín about a hardware salesman and a Chinese boy in Buenos Aires, grossing a whopping equivalent of 4.4 million dollars.

The highest grossing picture for the neighboring country Brazil was Roberto Santucci's De pernas pro ar, a comedy about the exploration of the changes one woman faces after being fired from her job. The most successful Chilean film of the year was a biopic of Violeta Parra entitled Violeta se fue a los cielos by renowned filmmaker Andrés Wood (Machuca), which just had its US premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this week.

The most successful Colombian film was El paseo, director Harold Trompetero's comedy of a family road trip to Cartagena produced by Dago García. In Mexico, the animated film Don Gato y su pandilla, directed by Alberto Mar in co-production with Argentina and based on the American cartoon created by Hannah-Barbera, ranked number one at the box office.

Director Gaston Vizcarra's El Guachimán, a film about an ordinary man's sudden acquisition of a large amount of money, took the top spot in Peru last year. Likewise, Uruguay's top-grossing film was Artigas - La Redota, César Charlone's fusion of history and fantasy that was part of the film series "Libertadores" about key historical figures in the fight for the independence of eight Latin American countries.

Lastly, the Indiana Jones parody, Er Conde Jones: El secreto de la bola criolla written and directed by Benjamín Rausseo, not only topped the year's box office in Venezuela, it became the highest grossing Venezuelan film ever with more than 650,000 spectators.  

   

Watch the trailers:

Argentina: Un cuento chino

Brazil: De pernas pro ar

Chile: Violeta se fue a los cielos

Colombia: El paseo

Mexico: Don Gato y su pandilla

Peru: El Guachimán

Uruguay: Artigas - La Redota

Venezuela: Er Conde Jones

List of Latino Actors Ever Nominated for an Oscar

As Mexican filmmaker Demián Bichir received this morning a nomination as Best Actor for this year's Academy Awards for his work in Chris Weitz's A Better Life, TropicalFRONT offers a recount of all of the Latino actors ever nominated for an Academy Award.

The very first Latino actor to receive an nomination was Puerto Rican actor José Ferrer as Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 1948 for his work in Joan of Arc. Just two years later Ferrer became the first Latino actor to win the Oscar for Best Actor for the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac. Anthony Quinn would become the most nominated Latino actor to the Oscars having been nominated as Best Supporting Actor for Viva Zapata! in 1952 and Lust for Life in 1956, winning both times, and receiving nominations as Best Actor in 1957 for Wild is the Wind and in 1964 for Zorba the Greek.

In the nineties Cuban-born actor Andy Garcia was nominated for his supporting role in The Godfather: Part III; and more recently Puerto Rican actor Benicio del Toro took the Oscar as Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 2000 for Traffic, and nabbed another nomination in the same category in 2003 for Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams.

In regards to Latina Actress, the first one ever to receive a nomination was Mexican actress Katy Jurado for her supporting role in Broken Lance in 1954. Few years later, Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno won the Oscar as Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her legendary role as Anita in West Side Story in 1961. Norma Aleandro became the first and only Argentine actor to date to be nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role in Luis Mandoki's Gaby: A True Story in 1987.

Only three Latin American women have been nominated as Best Actress: Fernanda Montenegro for Central Station in 1998; Salma Hayek for Frida in 2002; and Catalina Sandino for Maria Full of Grace in 2004. No Latina has ever won the Oscar as Best Actress in a Leading Role to date.

Pictured (from left to right): Rita Moreno, Anthony Quinn and Benicio del Toro.

Bichir, CHICO AND RITA, Lubezki, Sergio Mendes & Carlinhos Brown Nominated for the Oscars

Even though no Latin American film made it to the list of five nominees for the Foreign Language Film category for this year's Academy Awards, Mexican actor Demián Bichir (pictured) received a nomination as Best Actor for his work as an East L.A. gardener in Chris Weltz's A Better Life. Additionally, the film Chico & Rita by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal about the love story between a young Cuban piano player and a singer received a nomination as Best Animated Feature Film, whilst Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezky was nominated for his work on The Tree of Life. Other Latin American talent nominated for this year's Oscars are Brazilian musicians Sergio Mendes and Carlinhos Brown for their song Real in Rio from the film Rio in the Best Song category. The Oscars will be announced on Sunday, February 26 in Los Angeles.

MISS BALA: A Beauty Queen as a Stand-In for a Nation in Shock

By Naief Yehya

We are on the cusp of a new era of Mexican cinema in which the bitter reality imposed by the war on drug trafficking is finally being treated as a film-worthy subject, used both as entertainment and to invoke moral reflection. In the past, Mexican cinema has been characterized by decades of implicit censorship of any criticism of the governing PRI party or the military. This new wave of cinema, and the collapse of the archaic structures governing the content, budgets and distribution of movies, coincides with the intensification of a grand-scale conflict: the mutual bloodbath between cartels and the government that has made the civilians daily collateral damage. With so much violence, the Mexican population, confused and terrorized, has lost the ability to understand or act and culture has come to a virtual standstill.

The critical and economic triumphs that Mexican cinema has seen in recent years has help us transition from institutional revolutionary silence to a state of euphoria and complacency that has resulted in cultural standstill. While this moment of chaos could lead to a wave of grotesque narco-cinema that exploits the atrocious violence contaminating society, Gerardo Naranjo (Drama/Mex and Voy a explotar) has chosen a different approach with his latest film, Miss Bala. The movie was inspired by the case of Laura Zuñiga, Miss Sinaloa 208, who was arrested along with a number of members of the Juarez Cartel. The young Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman) dreams of participating in the Miss Baja California pageant. She ends up surviving a shoot-out at a local club, but the friend who brought her there is missing. Instead of escaping, Laura tries to find her friend and winds up involved with the boss of the fictitious Star Cartel, who forces her to work as a driver and mule in exchange for not killing her father and her brother. This same boss later buys Laura first place in the pageant.

Naranjo didn’t intend to do a film that explores the complexities and strategies of organized crime, nor did he originally want to make a film about narco-trafficking. This fact has caused mixed reactions; while there are those who praise the film for its indirect and emotional approach to narco-trafficking, others have accused it of being cowardly, misleading or complacent (especially since the crew had to pay off a local cartel during the filming). Naranjo makes it implicit that the Star Cartel traffics narcotics, but “does not include images of drugs,” as Miriam Canales pointed out in an interview for the magazine, Replicante. What he did aim to show was the condition of the victim, an innocent young girl who finds herself tangled up in an incomprehensible web where power figures operate with criteria that she doesn’t understand, where her free will is irrelevant, and where she risks being sacrificed at any moment and for any reason without anyone to protect her. The only sure thing about Laura, who even loses her name, (baptized “Canelita” by the drug traffickers’ boss), is her vulnerability. Faced with the dilemma of how to tackle such a painful and difficult subject, Naranjo avoids the temptation of sensationalism and opts to show the emotional impact of war neither from the viewpoint of the corrupt authorities nor the criminals. 

The main attribute of Miss Bala is not its realism but its almost dreamlike narrative flow in which Laura seems to float from situation to situation. Laura represents the condition of a society paralyzed with fear, shock and often involuntary complacency. There is no redemption and there is no consolatory justice, but there also isn’t a sense of exploitative desperation. What we see is a snapshot of the everyday tragedy that has turned these people into cannon fodder.

Naief Yehya (1963) Industrial engineer, journalist, writer and cultural critic. His work deals mainly with the impact of technology, mass media, propaganda and pornography in culture and society. His most recent book is Technoculture (Tusquets, 2008).

Latin American Films Snubbed for this Year's Oscars

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences released this morning its shortlist of nine films to compete in the Best Foreign Language Film category for this year's edition of the Oscars, and surprisingly no Latin American films were included in the list. The only Latin American reference in the shortlist was the Danish film Superclásico directed by Ole Christian Madsen which is set and was shot on location in Buenos Aries.

The strongest Latin American candidate to make it to this year's shortlist was the Mexican submission Miss Bala by Gerardo Naranjo, which opens in New York and LA this Friday, January 20. Mexico has been nominated in eight occasions and has never won the award for Best Foreign Language Film. In the past few years only Argentina has taken home the coveted award for El secreto de sus ojos / The Secret in their Eyes by Juan José Campanella in 2010.

PORFIRIO; LAS ACACIAS and FOUND MEMORIES Selected for New Directors/New Films

Three Latin American films have been selected to participate in this year's edition of the New Directors/New Films Festival that is jointly organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art. Both organizations announced today its initial seven official selections, almost half of them coming from Latin America: Pablo Giorgelli's Las acacias from Argentina, Alejandro Landes' Porfirio (pictured) from Colombia; and Lúcia Murat's Historias que so existem quando lembradas / Found Memories from Brazil. The 41st edition of New Directors/New Films, dedicated to "the discovery of new works by emerging and dynamic filmmaking talent" will take place from March 21 through April 1 in New York City.

THE TINIEST PLACE Wins Spotlight Award at the Cinema Eye Honors

Tatiana Huezo's debut feature film El lugar más pequeño / The Tiniest Place (pictured), was the recipient of the Spotlight Award at the 2012 Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking that took place last Wednesday at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. The Spotlight Award is for "those films that haven't yet received the attention they deserve." New York audiences will have a chance to see the Mexican production soon as it will be shown as part of the Cinema Tropical Festival at 92YTribeca on Sunday, January 22.

Brazil and Chile Competing for Rotterdam's Tiger Award

The Rotterdam Film Festival announced today the 15 films competing for its 2012 Tiger Awards Competition (for first and second featured films) in its 41st edition, which include two productions from Brazil and one from Chile: Kleber Mendoça Filho's O som ao redor / Neighbouring Sounds and Eduardo Nunes' Southwest / Sudoeste (Brazil); and the Chilean road movie De jueves a domingo / Thursday Till Sunday by Dominga Sotomayor. It was also announced that Brazilian actress and filmmaker Helena Ignez (The Red Light Bandit) will be part of the this year's official jury.

UN CUENTO CHINO; BOLETO AL PARAÍSO; MISS BALA and VIOLETA SE FUE A LOS CIELOS Nominated to the Goya Awards

The Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences announced today the nominees for the 26th edition of the Goya Awards, celebrating the best of Spanish cinema. In the Best Hispanic-American Film category films from four Latin American countries were nominated: Un cuento chino (pictured) by Sebastián Borensztein from Argentina; Violeta se fue a los cielos by Andrés Wood from Chile; Boleto al paraíso by Gerardo Chijona from Cuba; and Miss Bala by Gerardo Naranjo from Mexico. Additionally Mexican actress Salma Hayek also got a nomination as Best Actress for her work with director Alex de la Iglesia in his latest film La chispa de la vida. The winners will be announced at a special ceremony in Madrid on February 19.

MoMA to Present NY Premiere of Paula Markovitch's EL PREMIO

The Global Film Initiative (GFI) will be presenting the New York premieres of the Latin American films El premio / The Prize (pictured) by Paula Markovitch (Mexico/Argentina); El dedo / The Finger by Sergio Teubal (Argentina); Gordo, calvo y bajito / Fat, Bald, Short Man by Carlos Osuna (Colombia) as part of its annual Global Lens series, the annual collaboration between The Museum of Modern Art and GFI that is part of the touring film exhibition Global Lens, a project conceived to encourage filmmaking in countries with emerging film communities. Now on its ninth season, Global Lens 2012 will also be presenting the Brazilian film Riscado / Craft by Gustavo Pizzi, along with ten other films from Albania, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda and Turkey. The series runs January 12 - 28 at the Museum of Modern Art with the attendance of some filmmakers who will travel to New York to present their work to local audiences.

The most-awarded Mexican film of 2011 (in co-production with Argentina), winner of numerous international prizes including Best Film at the Morelia Film Festival, The Prize tells the story of an anxious young mother and her precocious daughter who flee Buenos Aires for the temporary seclusion of a ramshackle cottage on a remote beach. Her political activist’s life-in-hiding is jeopardized after her seven-year-old daughter is selected to participate in a local school’s patriotic essay contest. Set during the years of Argentine dictatorship and its notorious Dirty War (1975–83), director Paula Markovitch draws on his own experiences to capture the lacunae of childhood’s social and psychological worlds in this exquisitely acted and atmospheric drama about innocence in tumultuous times.

Also set in Argentina during the military dictatorship, in the face of electoral fraud and intimidation, the severed finger of a respected local leader points the way forward for independent-minded citizens and their town’s quest for democracy after dictatorship in Sergio Teubal’s The Finger. Based on real events, this charming dramatic comedy pokes fun at small town ways while celebrating the birth of true democratic values. In Carlos Osuna’s delightful animated feature film, Fat, Bald, Short Man, the prospects for Antonio, a lonely middle-aged notary unexpectedly change after he joins a self-improvement group. Whilst in Gustavo Pizzi’s Craft, Bianca, a struggling actress and celebrity impersonator, lands an audition and what may be her “big break” after an inspired director recasts his film around her socially marginalized life as an underrated artist in Rio. Craft was cowritten with the astounding Teles, who inhabits the role of Bianca with heartbreaking poignancy.

Latin American Films Get Selected for Rotterdam

The Rotterdam International Film Festival taking place from January 25 to February 5, announced today the rest of the lineup for this year's Spectrum, it's main program, which include seven Latin American films coming from Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. The Argentine film Cornelia frente al espejo / Cornelia at her Mirror by Daniel Rosenfeld along with Brazilian film Rua Aperana 52 by Júlio Bressane will have their world premieres at the festival, whilst Brazilian film Rat Fever by Cláudio Assis will have its international premiere. The other Latin American films participating in this year's festival are the Argentinean film Hoy no tuve miedo / Today I Felt No Fear by Iván Fund; the Chilean production Verano / Summertime by José Luis Torres Leiva and the Mexican films Los últimos cristeros / The Last Christeros (pictured) by Matías Meyer and Miss Bala by Gerardo Naranjo.

Latin American Films Top Best-of-2011 Lists

As 2011 came to an end, several publications published their best-of-the-year lists, which included some Latin American films. The most cherished Latin American film of the year was Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia de la luz / Nostalgia for the Light (pictured), which was named Best Documentary Film in the past edition of the Cinema Tropical AWARDS and was featured in several lists including those published by the Village Voice (number three, Best Documentary), indieWIRE (number two, Best Documentary; number 22, Best Film), Reverse Shot (number four), Houston Chronicle (number seven), Slant Magazine (number nine), Cinespect (number eight, Best Film; and Best Documentary in no particular order), and Film Comment (number 16).

Guzmán’s film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010 and was theatrically released by Icarus Films in the US in March of 2011. The Chilean documentary was also listed in Dennis Lim’s piece on the Most Overlooked Films of 2011 published by The New York Times; was one of twelve select films that got a four-star rating in The Washington Post last year and was included on NPR’s slant of Five Breakthrough Documentaries.

The late Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, who died last August, was also featured in several lists with his last film Mysteries of Lisbon, it scored the place number three in Slant Magazine, number five in the Village Voice, number six in Film Comment, and number seven in indieWIRE.

Additionally the Argentine film Historias extraordinarias / Extraordinary Stories by Mariano Llinás, which was released by Cinema Tropical at The Museum of Modern Art last May, also made it Lim’s piece on The New York Times, and it scored the place number ten in Reverse Shot and number 22 in Slant Magazine lists. The Mexican films El lugar más pequeño / The Tiniest Place by Tatiana Huezo and Año bisiesto / Leap Year by Michael Rowe also got mentioned in some critics’ lists published by indieWIRE, Filmmaker Magazine and Slant Magazine.

The Mexican submission to this year’s Academy Awards Miss Bala directed by Gerardo Naranjo, as well as the Argentine film Las Acacias directed by Pablo Giorgelli were included in the Best Undistributed Films of the Year by Film Comment and indieWIRE. Both films are scheduled for US release in 2012. Moreover film critic Howard Feinstein also included the Mexican film Fecha de caducidad / Expiration Date in his list of best of the year published by Filmmaker Magazine, and featured Mexican actress Úrsula Pruneda as one of the best performances of the year for her leading role in Hari Sama's El sueño de Lu / Lu's Dream.