From 11 to 20 April, the Kinolatino Latin American film festival will be taking over cinemas in several Belgian cities. On the programme: feature films, a night of shorts, a myriad of documentaries and a round table on the state of film production in Latin America.
When was the last time you saw a Latin American film on Brussels screens? Despite a huge diversity of points of view, talented directors and actors, and awards at international festivals, Latin American films still have too much trouble being distributed in our country. The organisers of Kinolatino are determined to remedy this situation, with some fifteen screenings of unreleased films from all over the continent.
The programme aims for diversity, both in terms of genres and countries of production. A number of films caught my eye. El otro hijo tells the story of a teenager rebuilding his life after the accidental death of his brother. Colombian director Juan Sebastian Quebrada uses the codes of the teen movie to tell a moving, modern story of bereavement. The Brazilian film Pedagio deals with the family conflict that erupts when a suburban mother learns that her child is gay. She will do anything to raise the money to send him to conversion therapy. Finally, El caso Monroy is an opportunity to see a genre that is rarely seen in our country: the Latin American comedy. The film by Peruvian director Josué Mendez follows the adventures of a retired civil servant who, after a visit to a women's prison, rediscovers the meaning of his life by helping the inmates to reintegrate. A wry comedy about Peru's prison system.
In addition to feature-length films, Kinolatino's programme also includes documentaries. This is a world of its own in Latin America, the land of narrative journalism, where the codes of fiction are used to tell real stories. The programme also focuses on "micro-documentaries", which start from a specific point of view and then amplify it to take on a more universal theme. It's a style we've already seen in many of the region's podcasts, and it seems to be repeated in documentaries. For example, the Mexican documentary El eco talks about the environment by following the development of children in a small isolated community, in total harmony with nature. Samuel e a luz films contemporary Brazil and takes as its starting point the arrival of electricity in a village through the eyes of a child. In the documentary Ana Rosa, Colombian director Catalina Villar looks back at the history of psychiatry and the place assigned to women by weaving together the story of her grandmother, who underwent a lobotomy.
The festival also aims to highlight the historical and artistic links between our country and Latin America. Chilean director Valeria Sarmiento's El realismo socialista is a highly original project. She is editing the film made by her late husband (Raul Ruiz) in 1973. Ruiz had made a political satire that highlighted the discrepancies within Allende's socialist revolution, where left-wing intellectual elites and the working class coexisted. Forced to flee his country when Pinochet came to power, the film was finally edited 50 years later by his widow. The film was made possible by documents found at the Cinémathèque de Belgique. The historical film Notas para una pelicula tells the story of Belgian engineer Gustave Verniory, who laid out the country's railway in 1889. This project was the culmination of the colonisation of the Mapuche territories in Patagonia.
Kinolatino is also a unique opportunity to meet the artists. On April 17th, a round table on Latin American film production will be held at the Centre administratif de la Ville de Bruxelles, with directors Daniela Goggi (El rapto), Tito Jara (El rezador), Fernando Arze (Los de abajo) and Felipe Gálvez (Los colonos).
After the demise of Peliculatina a few years ago, Latin American cinema finally has a dedicated festival in Brussels. It's a welcome initiative to showcase the continent's talents and the diversity of their outlooks and formats. Kinolatino helps to showcase productions that are not widely represented here, and to support an industry that often cannot survive on domestic consumption alone. The festival has national ambitions, with screenings in Brussels, Leuven, Antwerp, Nivelles, Liège and Namur, and the success of this initiative will hopefully lead to greater distribution of Latin American films in our country.
For full details of the festival, click here: www.kinolatino.be
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