Fernando
Robles (Federico Luppi) is a Professor of Literature teaching in Buenos
Aires. He has been married to Lilian Roviera (Mercedes Sampietro) all
his life. Liliana, a Spaniard, works as a social worker in one of the
marginal districts of the city. They love, respect, are loyal to each
other, and neither can imagine life without the other. Their only son
Pedro is married, has two children, and lives comfortably in a middle-class
suburb of Madrid. But Fernando’s calm, reflective world, is about
to be altered when he receives notification of compulsory early retirement.
Through the relationship of Fernando and Liliana, the director, one
of the best Argentine narrators, focuses on the state of the country:
a threatening state of affairs pointing to a crisis that has permeated
everyone and everything. Taking advantage of Fernando’s intellectual
profession, Aristarain constructs a character, and a voice over, which
has little time for niceties or frivolities. Time is of the essence,
and actor Luppi, well remembered by Canadian audiences for “Time
Of Revenge”, brings pride and a combative spirit to Fernando’s
life. But it is Mercedes Sampietro, in the complex role of Liliana,
whether in busy Buenos Aires or in Córdoba, the country place
where they take refuge, who is the one who offers the acting master
class.
“Common Ground”/Lugares Comunes, is the 10th film by Aristarain
and has won for Mercedes Sampietro, the Spanish equivalent of the Oscar
for Best Actress, 2003. Also, the film has garnered “Best Screenplay”
at 2003 San Sebastian Film Festival.
PRINCIPAL CAST: Federico
Luppi, Mercedes Sampietro, Arturo Puig, María Fiorentino, Carlos
Santamaría.
AWARDS: Best Actress 2003,
Goya Prize, Spain – Best Screenplay, San Sebastian Film Festival,
2003 – Best Jury Prize for Screenplay, San Sebastian Film Festival,
2003.
L’isola is
an island off Sicily whose culture, dating back to antiquity, straddles
a fine line between tradition and the demands of modern life. It is
also shaped by the timeless dignity of the tuna fishermen (the tonnaroti)
and the masons of the volcanic rock. L’isola is also the prison
on the shore of the island, dug into the volcanic rock and surrounded
by cement. The prisoners, some of whom work among the island’s
people, are confined also by the natural barrier of the sea.
A
beautiful ascetic film, this is the story of Turi (Ignazio Ernandes)
and Teresa (Veronica Guarrasi) a brother and a sister, who live on the
island with their father (Marcello Mazzarella), a fisherman, and mother
and grandmother (Ilary De Ioannon). Turi, a reserved clumsy boy who
seldom speaks or smiles, is 14 years old, more mature than other boys
and already working. Teresa is a spontaneous, happy, 10 year old, and
she just wants to go fishing like her brother. With the torrid, difficult
weather, and the centuries-old preparation of the fishnets for the tuna
hunt, a loving but tough family life unfolds for Turi and Teresa. It
is a decisive year in their lives which moves slowly through the seasons.
A year when adolescence, other youngsters’ arrival and innocent
jealousies set in. A time of separation and growing-up, when Turi decides
to follow the path of his forefathers.
PRINCIPAL CAST: Veronica Guarrasi,
Ignazio Ernandes, Marcello Mazzarella , Erri De Luca, Anna Ernandes,
Francesco Vasile, Ilary De Ioannon.
AWARDS: L’isola
premiered in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes 2003.
MY
TIME IS TODAY,PAULINHO DA VIOLA
(Meu Tempo E Hoje, Paulinho Da Viola)
BRAZIL
Director: Isabel Jaguaribe
Documentary, 83 minutes, 2003
The
gentle Paulinho Da Viola is one of the most loved and respected Brazilian
samba composers, players and singers. A prolific musician, he released
an album per year during the eighties, consolidating his musical gains
and then proceeding in the 90’s to a flowering of his talents.
Known for his acoustic style and purity of sound, he is particularly
admired as a revivalist of the instrumental choro style. Belonging to
the same generation of the rock-oriented tropicalistas and the post
Bossa Nova crowd, Paulinho delved into the style of the traditional
samba song and the sambas de morro, sung by the urban poor of Brazil’s
slums. Until recently, Da Viola’s older albums in Brazil have
been long out of print, but now fans of acoustic samba can celebrate
their renewed availability. Surely this film will contribute to do just
that. Conceived more as an homage of love than as a hard nosed documentary,
the film abounds in performances, interviews with Viola’s teachers
and friends, and even Da Viola’s musical influences, habits and
eccentricities. There are also wonderful jam-sessions involving musical
peers such as Marina Lima, Elton Medeiros, Zeca Pagodinho, Marisa Monte,
and Velha Guarda da Portela to name a few. The main revelation, however,
is to be found in the musician’s reflections on the subject of
time, a theme repeatedly broached in many of his compositions. As the
title of the film affirms, his time is always now. Or better, as he
himself says: “I don’t live in the past, the past lives
in me.
THE
FIRST NIGHT (La Primera Noche)
COLOMBIA
Director: Luis Alberto Restrepo
Drama, 90 minutes, 2003
If
the title of this film makes you think of a wedding…think twice,
because a wedding it is not. With this film, director Luis Alberto Restrepo
sets in motion one of the most powerfully tight, realistic, and well-shot
dramas about the Colombian civil war we have seen in years. No wonder
the film is collecting award after award and was also the 2004 Colombian
candidate for “Best Foreign Film” at the Oscars. In the
past 15 years, 2 million rural workers have been brutally displaced
from their lands. The majority has gone to the main cities of Colombia
with some faint hope and carrying with them…nothing. The film
tells the story of two brothers torn apart by the war. Wilson (Hernán
Méndez) is a hot-headed young father who joins the guerrillas
leaving his wife Paulina (Carolina Lizarago) and their child alone.
Meanwhile Toño (John Alex Toro) joins the army until Wilson’s
death forces him to take care of Paulina, who, now with two small babies
to take care of, is determined to find a better life in Bogotá.
It is the stage for a wild journey and a “love-hate-love”
relationship between the two of them. But if the backdrop of this story
is the conflict in the country, the real stage lies in the hearts of
its protagonists.
PRINCIPAL CAST: Carolina
Lizarazo, John Alex Toro, Hernán Méndez, Enrique Carriazo,
Julian Román, Ana Maria Sanchez, Diego Vasquez, Alfonso Ortiz,
Jennifer Steffens, and others.
AWARDS: Best Opera Prima,
Best Actor (John Alex Toro), Best Photography, Cartagena Film Festival
2003 – Best Latin Film, Mar del Plata International Film Festival
2003 – Prix Rail D’oc Award, Tolouse Film Festival, France
2003 – Best Film, HispanicAmerican Film Festival, Rosario, Argentina,
2003 – Nomination for Director Restrepo to the Sundance/NHK International
Filmmaker Award – Best Actress (Carolina Lizarago), Calcuta Int.
Film Festival, India, 2003.
PACHITO
REX, I’M LIVING BUT NOT FOR GOOD
(Pachito Rex, me voy pero no del todo)
MEXICO, 2002
Director: Fabian Hoffman
Political Satire, 86 minutes
Directed
by Argentinean filmmaker and émigré to Mexico, Fabian
Hoffman, Pachito Rex is both a provocative political satire and a cinematographic
adventure. Originally conceived as an interactive DVD, the film presents
a three-episode conjecture about the title character, a pop singer turned
demagogue politician who may or may not have been murdered in an undetermined
Latin American country. The film is the sum of several stories that
surround the assassination attempt of Francisco Ruiz, the controversial
singer, and the favorite candidate to win the elections. The stories
of the alleged assassin, of a policeman investigating the disappearance
of the body five years after the attempt,
and that of an architect hired to design a mausoleum in memory of the
possible dictator, become entwined and twisted. Over time the film revises
several facts, focusing on the main characters who may have plotted
to kill Pachito or who tried to expose the conspiracy. Pachito Rex closely
ressembles the real story of the assassination of Mexican presidential
candidate Luis Colosio in Tijuana in 1994. The treatment of the film,
paying hommage here and there to the tone of Well’s “Citizen
Kane,” offers an intense satirical vision of the materialistic
ambitions and idolatry that contemporary politicians exude it seems…everywhere.
PRINCIPAL CAST: Jorge
Zárate, Ernesto Gómez Cruz, Ana Ofelia Murguía
Damián Alcazar
AWARDS: Best Film, Chicago
Int. Film Festival 2002 – Best Film, Guadalajara Film Festival,
Mexico – Best Latin Film, Mar del Plata Int. Film Festival, Argentina,
2002 – San Diego Latino Film Festival – Ariel Award (Mexican
Oscar) for Best Actor (Jorge Zárate) and Best Art Direction.,
2002.
EDIFICIO
MASTER, A BUILDING IN COPACABANA (Edificio Master)
Prolific
director Eduardo Coutinho, who has also worked extensively as the screenwriter
of some of the best Brazilian films -“Doña Flor and her
two husbands” for example-, is also an actor and producer. Since
the late 60’s he has been chronicling Brazil’s marginalized
citizens, and with this film he embarks on another human adventure.
For seven days, and with a small camera crew, he filmed the daily life
of the residents of the Master, a high rise located one block away from
the beach in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. The Master building is a microcosm
of urban life in Rio with a different dramatic story unfolding floor
by floor. This includes a middle-aged couple who met through the classified
ads; a prostitute who supports her daughter and sister; and a janitor
who suspects that his adoptive father, whom he regularly dreams is his
real father. These are just a few of the thirty-seven lives revealed
inside the walls of the Master building. There is a humor, drama, surprises,
and wonderful insights into the mind and souls of the people who inhabit
the Master. Of course they are Brazilian and they are far away from
us, but not that far away from the inhabitants of any apartment building
anywhere in the world.
Coutinho
says of the making of Edifício Master: “The initial research
was a very arduous task. We rang the bell 23 times on each floor, and
then waited for an answer in the dark (Brazil was going through a power
shortage then): either there was no answer, or a refusal, polite or
rude, or they would agree to talk with us…it was an extraordinarily
intense life (and cinematic) experience.”
AWARDS: Silver Daisy Award,
Best Documentary, Brazil, 2003 - Golden Kikito For Best Documentary,
Gramado Film Festival, 2003
ONCE
UPON A TIME IN PARADISE (El Lugar donde estuvo el paraíso)
At
the beginning of the eighties, military dictatorships ruled Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia and Peru. In Iquitos, a city in the
Peruvian Amazon, close to the Colombian/Brazilian border, the Consul
of a country ‘to the south’ faces the arrival of a daughter
he has not seen in years. He is also faced with the menace of a diplomat
collaborating with the military, who watches the Consulate and investigates
the Consul’s motives for offering protection to a pilot, who is
allegedly a deserter.
The film is based on the novel by the same name written by Chilean author
Carlos Franzis. It tells of a Consul (Federico Luppi) who has lived
in the “Cono Sur” and has a complex, intense relationship
with a cabaret entertainer.
Spanish
Director Gerardo Herrero has said this of the film: “My film,
with the backup of Ibermedia and their team, is a combination of professionals
coming from different parts of Hispanic-America. Besides the film opening
in festivals in Spain, its commercial release will be prolonged in Argentina,
Peru and Brazil, so that the big audiences can enjoy it. But Hispanic
American filmmakers should think that we do not only make films for
our own native countries. Speaking a common language, we should design
projects that overcome nationalities. The characters in this film live
at the edge of the precipice, in search of tenderness and hope. Ana
(Elena Ballesteros) for example, arrives to the place searching for
love, not knowing that the Consul is also looking for love. He has found
it in Julia (Paulina Galvez) a singer he has rescued from a miserable
life and who has helped him to overturn his own weaknesses.” The
film was shot in the jungle of Iquitos, not far away from where “Fitzcarraldo”
and “Pantaleón Y Las Visitadoras” were shot.
PRINCIPAL
CAST:
Federico Luppi (Cónsul), Elena Ballesteros (Anna), Gastón
Pauls (Enrico), Paulina Galvez (Julia), Gianfranco Brero (Goncalvez),
Villanueva Cosse (Rubiroza), Gabriel Sotillo (Lucas), Carlos Victoria
(Dr. Menéndez), Teddy Guzman (Marlene).
It
is the end of 1880’s. German merchant and gentleman farmer Cornelio
Souchay (Jorge Perugorría), views himself as a progressive businessman,
and socializes with like-minded men in cafés and night clubs
in western Cuba. He meets Ursula Lambert (Lía Chapman), a freed
black slave from Haiti. Beautiful and distinguished, she has become
a businesswoman, and they fall in love. From the initial andantino -the
lovers´ meeting- we are taken on to the premonitions that climax
in tragedy. This
is a true story inspired by the lives of Cornelio and Ursula. A boundless,
passionate love, based on historical realities. The complicated love
affair between a woman descending from slaves with a European investor,
is of course, allegorical of colonial Cuba. We travel to the breaking
point of the slavery boom, and the triumph of the "plantation economy."
These are times of greed, and patriotic romanticism, personified by
young Criollo intellectuals who ruminate and fight their disagreements.
The music, played by a black orchestra, is the crown jewel of the story.
Director Rigoberto Lopez Pego has received many awards for his more
than 30 documentaries. This is his first feature film and certainly
an impressive debut.
PRINCIPAL CAST: Jorge
Perugorria , Lia Chapman , Ruben Brenas , Raul Martin , Raquel Rubi
, Nelson Gonzales
AWARDS: “La Vigia
Award”, “Cinematography Award”, The Havana International
Film Festival 2003
No Shame is an ironic romantic comedy about actors. Young aspiring actors,
teaching professional ones, desperate ones, the people who write for
them and the particular and sometimes funny world they inhabit.
Isabel, a drama coach, comes across a screenplay based on a love story
which takes place in the summer of 1979. While reading it she realizes
that it’s based on an intense romance she had with the director
Mario Fabra, 21 years before. He is the author of the screenplay and
it is based precisely in that romance which lasted only 17 hours. A
romance she has not been able to forget. Isabel rings Mario whom she
hasn’t seen since then and arranges to meet him. However when
she sees him, she feels like a fool and pretends she doesn’t recognize
him. He does exactly the same thing.
Both
of them have now young lovers. Mario has Cecilia, an actress in soap
operas, and Isabel has Alberto, who teaches self-expression. Mario needs
new actors for his film and decides to get them from Isabel and her
school. What he really wants is to be near her and Isabel, it seems,
also wants just that. The casting session gets under way and a group
of young actors and actresses prepare to present a few scenes so that
the director can assess their talents. And so it is that through a screenplay
and with the excuse of a love story, director Oristrell does a sometimes
acid, forgiving, and always smiling intelligent dissection of the world
he belong to.
PRINCIPAL CAST: Verónica
Forqué (Isabel), Daniel Giménez Cacho (Mario), Candela
Peña (Cecilia), Carmen Balagué (Nacha), Elvira Lindo (Analista),
Rosa María Sarda (Ronda), Jorge Sanz (Alberto), Marta Etura (Belén),
Daniel Martin (Felipe), Raúl García (Gregorio), Cecilia
Freire (Lara).
AWARDS: Goya 2002 for
Best Actress, Rosa María Sarda - Málaga Film Festival
2002: Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Actress, Rosa Maria Sarda,(Jason,
so already have this film’s photo)
GRISSINOPOLI
(THE COUNTRY OF THE BREADSTICKS)
(Grissinopoli, el país de los grisines)
ARGENTINA, 2004
Director: Dario Doria and Luis Camardella
Documentary, 81 minutes
At this time in 2004, unemployment in Argentina is at 24% and half of
the population lives under the poverty line.
By
the day they decided to go on strike, more than nine months had passed
without them receiving the full payment of their salaries. That Wednesday
in June, the sixteen workers of Grissinopoli, a bread stick factory
in Buenos Aires, demanded their employers for due payment of $100 pesos.
This claim was intended to be the sine qua non condition for continuing
work. But no one came up to pay the salaries on Friday. They neither
came on Monday or Tuesday. Indebted and bankrupted, the company, with
the workers still on the premises, was literally abandoned by their
owners. Immerse in this situation, the workers of Grissinopoli decide
to occupy, live and resist in their working post, in an attempt to make
the company work by profiting from the means they have at hand. Notwithstanding,
this desperate and utopian response to the increasing unemployment is
not an easy way out. A recent amendment to the law that rules bankruptcy
cases, enables a financing company to acquire Grissinopoli for 8% of
its value, imposing no obligation to keep the working posts nor pay
the owed salaries.
The workers of Grissinopoli, afraid that the financing company might
just be behind a real estate deal, sets about to take their first steps
in the world of the Law and law-makers, to fight for their rights. By
doing so, they have created a growing social movement that have succeeded
in saving till the present day, over 10,000 working posts in Argentina.
AWARDS: 35th Nyon, Switzerland,
International Documentary Film Festival, Jury Prize, 2004.
THE
MOUNTAIN HAWK (El Gavilán De La Sierra)
MEXICO,
2002
Director: Juan Antonio De La Riva
Drama, 100 minutes
After
the huge success of “Amores Perros” a couple of years ago,
there has been a tendency in many Latin American and Hollywood films,
to focus on grueling urban stories of drugs, poverty and crimes. The
story of The Mountain Hawk is a welcome antidote to that. Not that the
realism is in any way less shocking, but it has an airy, folkloric feeling.
And thanks to De La Riva’s excellent direction, the narration
is all the more compelling.
As in some of the best films, the story is deceptively simple: Rosendo
is a street singer in Mexico City. He learns of his brother Gabriel’s
criminal career when he and his gang are brutally killed by the police.
He then decides to go to their birthplace in the State of Durango to
see his father and friends, and to learn the truth about Gabriel.
Through
flashbacks during the journey he remembers many characters, thereby
slowly beginning to reveal his brother’s life. Relatives and friends
offer different versions in which Gabriel appears as a common criminal
or idealized with the mythical aura of a generous bandit: the wild mountain
hawk. But it also clarifies many aspects of Rosendo’s life, who,
little by little starts blending his musical talents with the idea of
composing a popular corrido (folk song) to keep his brother’s
memory alive.
PRINCIPAL CAST: Guillermo
Larrea (Rosendo), Juan Angel Esparza (Gabriel), Clauda Goytia (Soledad),
Mario Almada (Don Joaquín), Paul Choza (Roque Aguilar), Jose
Juan Meraz (“El Meño”), Abel Woolrich (“Melitón),
Rafael Velasco (Aurelio), Héctor Tellez (Chano Esparza), José
Rodriguez (Pedro Gallo).
AWARDS: Nominated for
six Ariel Awards (Mexican Oscars): Best Picture, Director, Supporting
Actor, Original Screenplay, Photography, and Editing- 2002. - Best Film,
Acapulco 2002 – Best Mexican Cinematography, Guadalajara International
Film Festival 02 – Mar del Plata Int. Film Festival, Best Music
Award, Argentina 02 – Montreal Film Festival 02-
SUB-TERRA
(UNDERGROUND)
CHILE, 2003
Director: Marcelo Ferrari
Epic Romance, 108 minutes
An
epic drama set in the 1880’s, Sub-Terra tells the story of a man
inside the largest coal mine in the world, experiencing conflictive
impulses in his heart. While the aristocratic family of Cousino Goyeneche
is dreaming of progress, the coal miners are claiming their dignity
in a time when human and social changes were starting to surface with
force.
Based on the short stories of Chilean writer Baldomero Lillo, Sub-Terra
is the Chilean film industry’s first super production. It took
3 years to complete and was beautifully shot entirely on location in
the coal area of Lota. Cameras had to be taken 500 meters below sea
level into the coal mine of “El Chiflón del diablo”,
where the coal miners worked. As director Marcelo Ferrari said: “while
the film is entertaining, it also make one reflect on a piece of the
history of our country.” Actors Francisco Reyes and the Chilean-Spanish
actress Paulina Gálvez produce an intense romance “antagonistic
in economic terms” as the actor ironically put it to the press.
Less than two weeks after it hit the box office it had been seen by
more than 100.000 people in Chile.
PRINCIPAL
CAST: Francisco Reyes, Paulina Galvez, Ernesto Malbrán,
Consuelo Holzapfel, Héctor Noguera, Cristian Chaparro, Nicolás
Saavedra, Alejandro Trejo, Gabriela Medina, Berta Lasala, Mariana Loyola,
Patricio Bunster, Danny Foix.
AWARDS: Gran Paoa Award
for: Best Film, Best Photography, Audience Award and International Catholic
Film Organizatin Award, 15th International Film Festival of Viña
Del Mar, Chile 2003 - Sol de Oro Award for Best Actress (Biarritz, France,
2004)- Colón de Plata Best Director, Colón de Plata Best
Photography, Audience Award, Huelva, Spain, 2004 -
A
TALKING PICTURE (UM FILM FALADO)
PORTUGAL/FRANCE/ITALY,
2003
Director: Manoel De Oliveira
Duration: 96 minutes
Rosa
Maria, a young history professor, sets out with her daughter Maria Joana
on a cruise through the Mediterranean to Bombay, India. There they are
to meet to meet her husband, a civil aviator, for a vacation on the
other side of the world. This pleasure cruise allows Rosa Maria, to
show her daughter, and see for herself for the first time, places which
she lectures on, but has never visited.
Travelling to Ceuta, Marseilles, the ruins of Pompeii, Athens, the pyramids
of Egypt, Istanbul, their journey covers thousands of years of history,
through the Mediterranean civilization that marked and still marks Western
Culture.
On
board, Rosa Maria meets the ship’s American captain and three
impressive women, well-known figures of different nationalities: a renowned
French businesswoman Catherine Deneuve, an Italian former model, Stefania
Sandrelli, and a Greek actress Irene Papas. But sailing towards the
Persian Gulf, a strange threat disturbs the cruise and menaces the ship
and the life of its passengers.
This is the most recent film by 91-year old Master Portuguese director
Manoel de Oliveira, who has been directing one film a year for the last
twenty years, and amazing audiences around the world.
NOTE
OF INTENT: This is "a talking film" because the dialogue is
spoken in several languages. Each one of these languages represents
a contribution to the evolution of Western civilization since its origins,
which is also a surreptitious way of touching the core of this talking
film. The film is also a pretext to pay homage to three great actresses:
Deneuve, Sandrelli and Papas, who have had a long and glorious artistic
journey. They give us a critical vision of this same civilization in
casual dinner talk, with the worldly ship’s captain leading them
thorough the journey.
PRINCIPAL CAST: John Malkovich
(Captain John Walesa), Catherine Deneuve (Delfina), Stefania Sandrelli
(Francesca), Irene Papas (Helena), Leonor Silveira (Rosa Maria), Luis
Miguel Cintra (Portuguese actor), Filipa de Almeida (Maria Joana)
AWARDS: Golden Lion Lifetime
Achievement Award to Mr. De Oliveira, Venice International Film Festival
2004.
EAST
END KIDS (Vues de l’est)
CANADA
Director : Carole Langanière
Documentary
Social-Educational, 52 minutes
In
Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, east Montreal where she grew up, Carole Laganière
films the lives, hopes and dreams of kids today, who face a difficult
future.
East End Kids sets out to meet children from this tough neighborhood.
Its very name conjures up images of poverty and social problems. The
film gives voice to children who, might, at first appearances, have
few chances of escaping their condition, yet who share the same hopes
and desires as anyone else on the road to adulthood.
We get to know their neighbourhood, their world, and the issues that
concern them: their families – whatever the structure; their hangouts;
love and friendship; poverty, violence, what they see of drug use and
prostitution; and school life.
By
filming the children where they are and where they want to go, in an
intimate conversational manner, as opposed to talking heads; the film
gains precious insights into their daily lives: at home, at school,
in the back alleys, at the park, out bicycling…
Going beyond fear or resignation, this film shines with the radiance
of these children and speaks of the strength and beauty of their aspirations;
opening up a space where hope can triumph. Not that the film lacks in
incredible interviews…the difference is that this time around
the children themselves are doing some of the best of them!
Fernando
Robles (Federico Luppi) is a Professor of Literature teaching in Buenos
Aires. He has been married to Lilian Roviera (Mercedes Sampietro) all
his life. Liliana, a Spaniard, works as a social worker in one of the
marginal districts of the city. They love, respect, are loyal to each
other, and neither can imagine life without the other. Their only son
Pedro is married, has two children, and lives comfortably in a middle-class
suburb of Madrid. But Fernando’s calm, reflective world, is about
to be altered when he receives notification of compulsory early retirement.
Through the relationship of Fernando and Liliana, the director, one
of the best Argentine narrators, focuses on the state of the country:
a threatening state of affairs pointing to a crisis that has permeated
everyone and everything. Taking advantage of Fernando’s intellectual
profession, Aristarain constructs a character, and a voice over, which
has little time for niceties or frivolities. Time is of the essence,
and actor Luppi, well remembered by Canadian audiences for “Time
Of Revenge”, brings pride and a combative spirit to Fernando’s
life. But it is Mercedes Sampietro, in the complex role of Liliana,
whether in busy Buenos Aires or in Córdoba, the country place
where they take refuge, who is the one who offers the acting master
class. 
A
beautiful ascetic film, this is the story of Turi (Ignazio Ernandes)
and Teresa (Veronica Guarrasi) a brother and a sister, who live on the
island with their father (Marcello Mazzarella), a fisherman, and mother
and grandmother (Ilary De Ioannon). Turi, a reserved clumsy boy who
seldom speaks or smiles, is 14 years old, more mature than other boys
and already working. Teresa is a spontaneous, happy, 10 year old, and
she just wants to go fishing like her brother. With the torrid, difficult
weather, and the centuries-old preparation of the fishnets for the tuna
hunt, a loving but tough family life unfolds for Turi and Teresa. It
is a decisive year in their lives which moves slowly through the seasons.
A year when adolescence, other youngsters’ arrival and innocent
jealousies set in. A time of separation and growing-up, when Turi decides
to follow the path of his forefathers. 
The
gentle Paulinho Da Viola is one of the most loved and respected Brazilian
samba composers, players and singers. A prolific musician, he released
an album per year during the eighties, consolidating his musical gains
and then proceeding in the 90’s to a flowering of his talents.
Known for his acoustic style and purity of sound, he is particularly
admired as a revivalist of the instrumental choro style. Belonging to
the same generation of the rock-oriented tropicalistas and the post
Bossa Nova crowd, Paulinho delved into the style of the traditional
samba song and the sambas de morro, sung by the urban poor of Brazil’s
slums. Until recently, Da Viola’s older albums in Brazil have
been long out of print, but now fans of acoustic samba can celebrate
their renewed availability. Surely this film will contribute to do just
that. Conceived more as an homage of love than as a hard nosed documentary,
the film abounds in performances, interviews with Viola’s teachers
and friends, and even Da Viola’s musical influences, habits and
eccentricities. There are also wonderful jam-sessions involving musical
peers such as Marina Lima, Elton Medeiros, Zeca Pagodinho, Marisa Monte,
and Velha Guarda da Portela to name a few. The main revelation, however,
is to be found in the musician’s reflections on the subject of
time, a theme repeatedly broached in many of his compositions. As the
title of the film affirms, his time is always now. Or better, as he
himself says: “I don’t live in the past, the past lives
in me.
If
the title of this film makes you think of a wedding…think twice,
because a wedding it is not. With this film, director Luis Alberto Restrepo
sets in motion one of the most powerfully tight, realistic, and well-shot
dramas about the Colombian civil war we have seen in years. No wonder
the film is collecting award after award and was also the 2004 Colombian
candidate for “Best Foreign Film” at the Oscars. In the
past 15 years, 2 million rural workers have been brutally displaced
from their lands. The majority has gone to the main cities of Colombia
with some faint hope and carrying with them…nothing. The film
tells the story of two brothers torn apart by the war. Wilson (Hernán
Méndez) is a hot-headed young father who joins the guerrillas
leaving his wife Paulina (Carolina Lizarago) and their child alone.
Meanwhile Toño (John Alex Toro) joins the army until Wilson’s
death forces him to take care of Paulina, who, now with two small babies
to take care of, is determined to find a better life in Bogotá.
It is the stage for a wild journey and a “love-hate-love”
relationship between the two of them. But if the backdrop of this story
is the conflict in the country, the real stage lies in the hearts of
its protagonists. 
Directed
by Argentinean filmmaker and émigré to Mexico, Fabian
Hoffman, Pachito Rex is both a provocative political satire and a cinematographic
adventure. Originally conceived as an interactive DVD, the film presents
a three-episode conjecture about the title character, a pop singer turned
demagogue politician who may or may not have been murdered in an undetermined
Latin American country. The film is the sum of several stories that
surround the assassination attempt of Francisco Ruiz, the controversial
singer, and the favorite candidate to win the elections. The stories
of the alleged assassin, of a policeman investigating the disappearance
of the body five years after the 
attempt,
and that of an architect hired to design a mausoleum in memory of the
possible dictator, become entwined and twisted. Over time the film revises
several facts, focusing on the main characters who may have plotted
to kill Pachito or who tried to expose the conspiracy. Pachito Rex closely
ressembles the real story of the assassination of Mexican presidential
candidate Luis Colosio in Tijuana in 1994. The treatment of the film,
paying hommage here and there to the tone of Well’s “Citizen
Kane,” offers an intense satirical vision of the materialistic
ambitions and idolatry that contemporary politicians exude it seems…everywhere.
Prolific
director Eduardo Coutinho, who has also worked extensively as the screenwriter
of some of the best Brazilian films -“Doña Flor and her
two husbands” for example-, is also an actor and producer. Since
the late 60’s he has been chronicling Brazil’s marginalized
citizens, and with this film he embarks on another human adventure.
For seven days, and with a small camera crew, he filmed the daily life
of the residents of the Master, a high rise located one block away from
the beach in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. The Master building is a microcosm
of urban life in Rio with a different dramatic story unfolding floor
by floor. This includes a middle-aged couple who met through the classified
ads; a prostitute who supports her daughter and sister; and a janitor
who suspects that his adoptive father, whom he regularly dreams is his
real father. These are just a few of the thirty-seven lives revealed
inside the walls of the Master building. There is a humor, drama, surprises,
and wonderful insights into the mind and souls of the people who inhabit
the Master. Of course they are Brazilian and they are far away from
us, but not that far away from the inhabitants of any apartment building
anywhere in the world. 
Coutinho
says of the making of Edifício Master: “The initial research
was a very arduous task. We rang the bell 23 times on each floor, and
then waited for an answer in the dark (Brazil was going through a power
shortage then): either there was no answer, or a refusal, polite or
rude, or they would agree to talk with us…it was an extraordinarily
intense life (and cinematic) experience.” 
At
the beginning of the eighties, military dictatorships ruled Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia and Peru. In Iquitos, a city in the
Peruvian Amazon, close to the Colombian/Brazilian border, the Consul
of a country ‘to the south’ faces the arrival of a daughter
he has not seen in years. He is also faced with the menace of a diplomat
collaborating with the military, who watches the Consulate and investigates
the Consul’s motives for offering protection to a pilot, who is
allegedly a deserter. 
Spanish
Director Gerardo Herrero has said this of the film: “My film,
with the backup of Ibermedia and their team, is a combination of professionals
coming from different parts of Hispanic-America. Besides the film opening
in festivals in Spain, its commercial release will be prolonged in Argentina,
Peru and Brazil, so that the big audiences can enjoy it. But Hispanic
American filmmakers should think that we do not only make films for
our own native countries. Speaking a common language, we should design
projects that overcome nationalities. The characters in this film live
at the edge of the precipice, in search of tenderness and hope. Ana
(Elena Ballesteros) for example, arrives to the place searching for
love, not knowing that the Consul is also looking for love. He has found
it in Julia (Paulina Galvez) a singer he has rescued from a miserable
life and who has helped him to overturn his own weaknesses.” The
film was shot in the jungle of Iquitos, not far away from where “Fitzcarraldo”
and “Pantaleón Y Las Visitadoras” were shot. 
It
is the end of 1880’s. German merchant and gentleman farmer Cornelio
Souchay (Jorge Perugorría), views himself as a progressive businessman,
and socializes with like-minded men in cafés and night clubs
in western Cuba. He meets Ursula Lambert (Lía Chapman), a freed
black slave from Haiti. Beautiful and distinguished, she has become
a businesswoman, and they fall in love. From the initial andantino -the
lovers´ meeting- we are taken on to the premonitions that climax
in tragedy. 
This
is a true story inspired by the lives of Cornelio and Ursula. A boundless,
passionate love, based on historical realities. The complicated love
affair between a woman descending from slaves with a European investor,
is of course, allegorical of colonial Cuba. We travel to the breaking
point of the slavery boom, and the triumph of the "plantation economy."
These are times of greed, and patriotic romanticism, personified by
young Criollo intellectuals who ruminate and fight their disagreements.
The music, played by a black orchestra, is the crown jewel of the story.
Isabel, a drama coach, comes across a screenplay based on a love story
which takes place in the summer of 1979. While reading it she realizes
that it’s based on an intense romance she had with the director
Mario Fabra, 21 years before. He is the author of the screenplay and
it is based precisely in that romance which lasted only 17 hours. A
romance she has not been able to forget. Isabel rings Mario whom she
hasn’t seen since then and arranges to meet him. However when
she sees him, she feels like a fool and pretends she doesn’t recognize
him. He does exactly the same thing. 
By
the day they decided to go on strike, more than nine months had passed
without them receiving the full payment of their salaries. That Wednesday
in June, the sixteen workers of Grissinopoli, a bread stick factory
in Buenos Aires, demanded their employers for due payment of $100 pesos.
This claim was intended to be the sine qua non condition for continuing
work. But no one came up to pay the salaries on Friday. They neither
came on Monday or Tuesday. Indebted and bankrupted, the company, with
the workers still on the premises, was literally abandoned by their
owners. Immerse in this situation, the workers of Grissinopoli decide
to occupy, live and resist in their working post, in an attempt to make
the company work by profiting from the means they have at hand. Notwithstanding,
this desperate and utopian response to the increasing unemployment is
not an easy way out. A recent amendment to the law that rules bankruptcy
cases, enables a financing company to acquire Grissinopoli for 8% of
its value, imposing no obligation to keep the working posts nor pay
the owed salaries. 
After
the huge success of “Amores Perros” a couple of years ago,
there has been a tendency in many Latin American and Hollywood films,
to focus on grueling urban stories of drugs, poverty and crimes. The
story of The Mountain Hawk is a welcome antidote to that. Not that the
realism is in any way less shocking, but it has an airy, folkloric feeling.
And thanks to De La Riva’s excellent direction, the narration
is all the more compelling.
Through
flashbacks during the journey he remembers many characters, thereby
slowly beginning to reveal his brother’s life. Relatives and friends
offer different versions in which Gabriel appears as a common criminal
or idealized with the mythical aura of a generous bandit: the wild mountain
hawk. But it also clarifies many aspects of Rosendo’s life, who,
little by little starts blending his musical talents with the idea of
composing a popular corrido (folk song) to keep his brother’s
memory alive. 
An
epic drama set in the 1880’s, Sub-Terra tells the story of a man
inside the largest coal mine in the world, experiencing conflictive
impulses in his heart. While the aristocratic family of Cousino Goyeneche
is dreaming of progress, the coal miners are claiming their dignity
in a time when human and social changes were starting to surface with
force. 
PRINCIPAL
CAST: Francisco Reyes, Paulina Galvez, Ernesto Malbrán,
Consuelo Holzapfel, Héctor Noguera, Cristian Chaparro, Nicolás
Saavedra, Alejandro Trejo, Gabriela Medina, Berta Lasala, Mariana Loyola,
Patricio Bunster, Danny Foix.
Rosa
Maria, a young history professor, sets out with her daughter Maria Joana
on a cruise through the Mediterranean to Bombay, India. There they are
to meet to meet her husband, a civil aviator, for a vacation on the
other side of the world. This pleasure cruise allows Rosa Maria, to
show her daughter, and see for herself for the first time, places which
she lectures on, but has never visited. 
NOTE
OF INTENT: This is "a talking film" because the dialogue is
spoken in several languages. Each one of these languages represents
a contribution to the evolution of Western civilization since its origins,
which is also a surreptitious way of touching the core of this talking
film. The film is also a pretext to pay homage to three great actresses:
Deneuve, Sandrelli and Papas, who have had a long and glorious artistic
journey. They give us a critical vision of this same civilization in
casual dinner talk, with the worldly ship’s captain leading them
thorough the journey. 
In
Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, east Montreal where she grew up, Carole Laganière
films the lives, hopes and dreams of kids today, who face a difficult
future.
By
filming the children where they are and where they want to go, in an
intimate conversational manner, as opposed to talking heads; the film
gains precious insights into their daily lives: at home, at school,
in the back alleys, at the park, out bicycling…