When Augusto Pinochet led the infamous military coup that overthrew Allende in 1973, everything collided and a new life that was not planned began. The situation became impossible for Allende’s supporters and exile or the risk of torture and death became the only options.
Four months after the coup Sergio left Santiago with a first stop in Argentina, where a brief encounter changed his future. “Our cameraman in Chile was a Briton. We met in Buenos Aires again, by chance, and he suggested me to go to England. He said he could help me with the visa and I felt tempted by the good reputation of the media in this country, so I decided to come”, he recalls. “It seems 500 years ago now.”
A year later, in 1975, the parents of Pablo Navarrete left their native Chile as well. They were political activists and supporters of Allende and had spent time in concentration camps under torture. Finally they got asylum in the UK and settled in London, where their son Pablo was born in 1978. Pablo is English but behind his perfect British accent he carries a very strong commitment towards Latin American culture, history and current issues. The subject of his PhD thesis is ‘Development Policy under the Chávez’ Government’ and he also focused on Venezuela for his documentary Inside the Revolution: A Journey into the Heart of Venezuela.
“The political experience of my parents has greatly influenced my outlook and interest in Latin America. I grew up in a very political household”, says Pablo. He has visited Chile only a few times, for short periods of time, but he keeps a very strong connection with Venezuela, because his family from mother’s side settled there after the coup.
Samantha is a very warm and lively person who has clearly assumed the UK style of working: responsible, organized, punctual and reliable. These qualities inherent of British professionals also captivated Sergio León in his turn. “One of the reasons why I remained here, besides the fact that my children started going to school and then to secondary school and then to university, is because the quality standards of television and the film industry are very high in this country, in comparison to other media that I’ve seen. Unfortunately, I have met very undisciplined film crews in Latin America. Indiscipline is unacceptable inside a film crew in the UK. Everybody knows their specific role in a production and how to work as a team, and this is why they come with a product in a very professional way”, Sergio points out.
This is one of the reasons why Luis Jara chose the UK as the place to pursue his higher education. “I wanted to specialize in filmmaking for a long time, and I would just consider as an option a top place in the world. My last job was for the BBC in Mexico, my boss was English and I had the opportunity to work with both languages constantly. At that moment
From 1974 to 2010, who knows how many Latin Americans had arrived into Britain, either escaping from a dictatorship, driven by the desires of the heart, looking for a better future or motivated to gain a high profile education. This is just a short encounter with five of them. But there is also Eva Tarr-Kirkhope, who came from Cuba and for already 20 years has been passionately and steadily organizing the ‘London Latin American Film Festival’, probably the pioneer of the many Latin American film festivals that bring the diversity of the Latino film industry to the screens of London and Britain nowadays; Ximena Córdova, of Venezuelan-Bolivian origins, who before embarking on a PhD in Latin American Studies was one of the founders of the Documentary Filmmakers Group (DFG), made a couple of short nonfiction films and lately has documented in video the Carnival of Oruro in Bolivia as an ethnographic support for her academic research. We can also refer to Mónica Rubio, from Colombia, a film editor and colourist at Neath Films, London, but above all a filmmaker in her own right with an alternative and very interesting body of work that explores the crossover between fiction and documentary. One of her most renowned pieces is the short film Chance. Made in her native Colombia, it is a true story about ordinary people who played and won the lottery after finding numbers on frogs and tortoises. The film was presented at various film festivals including Oberhausen, where it got the main prize, and Clermont-Ferrand, considered to be the Mecca of short films.
Four months after the coup Sergio left Santiago with a first stop in Argentina, where a brief encounter changed his future. “Our cameraman in Chile was a Briton. We met in Buenos Aires again, by chance, and he suggested me to go to England. He said he could help me with the visa and I felt tempted by the good reputation of the media in this country, so I decided to come”, he recalls. “It seems 500 years ago now.”
A year later, in 1975, the parents of Pablo Navarrete left their native Chile as well. They were political activists and supporters of Allende and had spent time in concentration camps under torture. Finally they got asylum in the UK and settled in London, where their son Pablo was born in 1978. Pablo is English but behind his perfect British accent he carries a very strong commitment towards Latin American culture, history and current issues. The subject of his PhD thesis is ‘Development Policy under the Chávez’ Government’ and he also focused on Venezuela for his documentary Inside the Revolution: A Journey into the Heart of Venezuela.
“The political experience of my parents has greatly influenced my outlook and interest in Latin America. I grew up in a very political household”, says Pablo. He has visited Chile only a few times, for short periods of time, but he keeps a very strong connection with Venezuela, because his family from mother’s side settled there after the coup.
It is there, in Venezuela, where Libia Villazana was born. She comes from Calabozo, Estado Guarico, the agro-industrial capital of Venezuela, located in the llanos, the vast tropical grassland plains. Libia defines herself as a “transnational subject settled in London”. She came to the UK for professional reasons and she received her doctoral
degree in Film Studies at the University of the West of England, in Bristol. Her subject of study was the economics and ideologies of international film co-productions across continents. Libia has an impressive CV and she moves with ease between different disciplines within the audiovisual sector: she is a documentary filmmaker, freelance film curator, film festival director and university lecturer.
As a film curator, Libia has promoted Latin American cinema in the UK by organizing retrospectives and masterclasses held by a wide range of Latin American directors and industry professionals such as Jorge Sanjinés (the acclaimed Bolivian director), Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas (one of the greatest Latin American filmmakers and intellectuals) and the Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi whose adaptation of Mario Vargas Llosa’s Pantaleón y las visitadoras was an internationally acclaimed hit.
As a film curator, Libia has promoted Latin American cinema in the UK by organizing retrospectives and masterclasses held by a wide range of Latin American directors and industry professionals such as Jorge Sanjinés (the acclaimed Bolivian director), Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas (one of the greatest Latin American filmmakers and intellectuals) and the Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi whose adaptation of Mario Vargas Llosa’s Pantaleón y las visitadoras was an internationally acclaimed hit.
When I ask Samantha Zarzosa, who is 35 and originally from Mexico, if we can carry on this interview in English, because I prefer not to translate her comments, she replies: “OK, for me it’s even better. I’m too used to speak in English nowadays.” She then tells me that she arrived to the UK in 1997 to study. Her mother is English and she had returned home while Samantha was still living in Mexico City. “I decided to come and do my degree over here. I studied Communications at Westminster University. My intention was to be here for three years and then go back to Mexico, but after these years I wanted to experience London a bit more, outside of student life, I was lucky and got a good job at Disney International, then I went on to work at Nickelodeon and then my third job was at the BBC. I was working in very exciting places and work was very interesting... With time it got harder and harder to go back to Mexico.”
Luis Jara, also from Mexico City, came to study in the UK just a few months ago, in January. He is a chatty 26 year old young man who transmits his passion for film through his very enthusiastic comments. We talk in our common language, Spanish, through Skype. I can’t see his face but his ‘chilango’ accent (the very distinctive way in which people native from Mexico City speak) makes me imagine a character from a movie by Carlos Cuarón.
“I think that Latin America, from a journalistic point of view, is so badly covered by the mainstream English language media, and British media are very much part of that. I think there are lots of stories around the region that are much more profound and deserve a less superficial exploration. In a way I made my documentary because of the frustration of how superficial I found the British media to cover the situation in Venezuela”, says Pablo Navarrete. “I decided to make this film because I wanted to put something out there that provided some level of balance to the discussion about Venezuela and to give a platform to the voices of the people that support Chávez... In Venezuela, whether you agree with what is going out there or not, I
think it’s an experiment that deserves a more honest evaluation than what we are receiving”, he adds.
Pablo’s documentary was self-financed, self-produced and self-distributed: “not a sustainable way to do a film”, as he recognizes, but as a compensation it has given him a lot of positive experiences. The premiere was held in August 2009 and with an alternative promotion, about 300 people attended the opening. Later on it had more screenings in London, Bradford, in some museums and universities in the US (including the prestigious Harvard and Columbia), and in Australia, where he showed it independently. Now, Pablo expects to finish his PhD and carry on doing more documentary films.
While technically Pablo Navarrete was a Briton making a film in Venezuela, Libia Villazana is a Venezuelan shooting in England. She is now working on her second documentary London Symphony for Latin American Britons, which focuses on the everyday life of selected Latin American communities in London. “Since the 1990s Britain has gradually become a major destination for the increasing Latin American exodus. The aim of my proposed video research project is to trace out and analyse the dynamics of the Latin American cultural heritage in Britain, with particular references to London. In doing so, the research intends to delve into the mechanisms of the Latin American cultural capital as part of their integration in the host
country”, explains the filmmaker. “The motivation of the study responds to the significant increase in the organisation of Latin American cultural events in London, mainly within the last ten years. In 1999, for instance, there was only one Latin American film festival in London, in 2007 there were five and in 2009 the number increased to eight. London also hosts a Latin American theatre festival since 2007 and the Latin American music festival since 2001. In addition, the largest Latin American Festival in London and in the UK, Carnaval del Pueblo, has significantly raised its attendance to 130,000 people in 2007. The Latin American presence in London is beginning to be felt and this ‘visibility’ is achieved to a great extent through these cultural expressions.”
Samantha Zarzosa is also working in the documentary field. She is very interested in new media as well, but production, she confesses, is her “main passion”. She teamed up with the very talented German director Eva Weber –whom she met whilst working at the BBC– and together they created the production house Odd Girl Out. “I really wanted to go into filmmaking for a long time but I started in television, so for me it was a perfect opportunity to go into that world. We’ve made four short documentaries. I was the main producer in three of them and I helped in the fourth one. At the moment we are just developing a feature length documentary and I am also talking to other directors to work with other people as well. We are in a transition period where our company is growing so we are looking at different options of how to expand it and possibly have collaborations with other people.”
Eva and Samantha are responsible of four beautiful jewels, internationally acclaimed The Intimacy of Strangers (which premiered at Edinburgh Film Festival), City of Cranes (originally made for Channel 4’s 3-Minute Wonder strand, it has been awarded at Los Angeles Film Festival and Full Frame Documentary Film Festival), Steel Homes (shown at Sundance and IDFA, the
most important festival for documentary films) and The Solitary Life of Cranes (Best British Short at Britdoc Film Festival). It is a common opinion of my interviewees that Latin America is misrepresented in the English media, and for some of them, to challenge this issue has been one of their biggest professional goals.
“I hate when there are too many programmes in this country that relate Latin America with the guerrilla, the cocaine and the prostitution”, says Sergio León. “This is why my constant fight has been to clean the face of Latin America”. Sergio has worked for the BBC, Channel 4, ITV as well as other TV stations as a producer, co-director, associate producer and writer, mostly covering stories related to Latin America from a different angle. He has traveled for work to Colombia, Cuba and most recently to Chile where he recorded an episode of the arts magazine The South Bank Show. There, the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg interviewed Isabel Allende, one of the most well known contemporary Latin American novelists. León has also organized Latin American film festivals in different cities of the UK, including Cardiff, Edinburgh, London and Bristol, where he resides.
“I hate when there are too many programmes in this country that relate Latin America with the guerrilla, the cocaine and the prostitution”, says Sergio León. “This is why my constant fight has been to clean the face of Latin America”. Sergio has worked for the BBC, Channel 4, ITV as well as other TV stations as a producer, co-director, associate producer and writer, mostly covering stories related to Latin America from a different angle. He has traveled for work to Colombia, Cuba and most recently to Chile where he recorded an episode of the arts magazine The South Bank Show. There, the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg interviewed Isabel Allende, one of the most well known contemporary Latin American novelists. León has also organized Latin American film festivals in different cities of the UK, including Cardiff, Edinburgh, London and Bristol, where he resides.
“I think that Latin America, from a journalistic point of view, is so badly covered by the mainstream English language media, and British media are very much part of that. I think there are lots of stories around the region that are much more profound and deserve a less superficial exploration. In a way I made my documentary because of the frustration of how superficial I found the British media to cover the situation in Venezuela”, says Pablo Navarrete. “I decided to make this film because I wanted to put something out there that provided some level of balance to the discussion about Venezuela and to give a platform to the voices of the people that support Chávez... In Venezuela, whether you agree with what is going out there or not, I
Pablo’s documentary was self-financed, self-produced and self-distributed: “not a sustainable way to do a film”, as he recognizes, but as a compensation it has given him a lot of positive experiences. The premiere was held in August 2009 and with an alternative promotion, about 300 people attended the opening. Later on it had more screenings in London, Bradford, in some museums and universities in the US (including the prestigious Harvard and Columbia), and in Australia, where he showed it independently. Now, Pablo expects to finish his PhD and carry on doing more documentary films.
While technically Pablo Navarrete was a Briton making a film in Venezuela, Libia Villazana is a Venezuelan shooting in England. She is now working on her second documentary London Symphony for Latin American Britons, which focuses on the everyday life of selected Latin American communities in London. “Since the 1990s Britain has gradually become a major destination for the increasing Latin American exodus. The aim of my proposed video research project is to trace out and analyse the dynamics of the Latin American cultural heritage in Britain, with particular references to London. In doing so, the research intends to delve into the mechanisms of the Latin American cultural capital as part of their integration in the host
Samantha Zarzosa is also working in the documentary field. She is very interested in new media as well, but production, she confesses, is her “main passion”. She teamed up with the very talented German director Eva Weber –whom she met whilst working at the BBC– and together they created the production house Odd Girl Out. “I really wanted to go into filmmaking for a long time but I started in television, so for me it was a perfect opportunity to go into that world. We’ve made four short documentaries. I was the main producer in three of them and I helped in the fourth one. At the moment we are just developing a feature length documentary and I am also talking to other directors to work with other people as well. We are in a transition period where our company is growing so we are looking at different options of how to expand it and possibly have collaborations with other people.”
Eva and Samantha are responsible of four beautiful jewels, internationally acclaimed The Intimacy of Strangers (which premiered at Edinburgh Film Festival), City of Cranes (originally made for Channel 4’s 3-Minute Wonder strand, it has been awarded at Los Angeles Film Festival and Full Frame Documentary Film Festival), Steel Homes (shown at Sundance and IDFA, the
Samantha is a very warm and lively person who has clearly assumed the UK style of working: responsible, organized, punctual and reliable. These qualities inherent of British professionals also captivated Sergio León in his turn. “One of the reasons why I remained here, besides the fact that my children started going to school and then to secondary school and then to university, is because the quality standards of television and the film industry are very high in this country, in comparison to other media that I’ve seen. Unfortunately, I have met very undisciplined film crews in Latin America. Indiscipline is unacceptable inside a film crew in the UK. Everybody knows their specific role in a production and how to work as a team, and this is why they come with a product in a very professional way”, Sergio points out.
This is one of the reasons why Luis Jara chose the UK as the place to pursue his higher education. “I wanted to specialize in filmmaking for a long time, and I would just consider as an option a top place in the world. My last job was for the BBC in Mexico, my boss was English and I had the opportunity to work with both languages constantly. At that moment
I started to pay more attention to British films and after a trip to London I decided that I was going to try here because I loved it. I got accepted in some universities but when I came back to Mexico I realized that it was going to be impossible to finance my studies and living without a grant. Basically all 2009 I spent looking for that grant and finally I got it from the FONCA (National Mexican Fund for Culture and Arts). I decided to stay at Goldsmiths University doing a Masters in Filmmaking, with specialization in directing and editing.”
In December 2010 Luis will finish his Masters degree, so I ask him what will come next. “Right now I am completely sure that this is what I want to do for real. Everybody asks me: ‘So what... Are you going to stay?’ I don’t see it this way, like if I came to stay. I am in search of projects wherever it will be and I will just follow what will come next, here or in Mexico, but the objective is to have interesting projects to accomplish.”
In December 2010 Luis will finish his Masters degree, so I ask him what will come next. “Right now I am completely sure that this is what I want to do for real. Everybody asks me: ‘So what... Are you going to stay?’ I don’t see it this way, like if I came to stay. I am in search of projects wherever it will be and I will just follow what will come next, here or in Mexico, but the objective is to have interesting projects to accomplish.”
From 1974 to 2010, who knows how many Latin Americans had arrived into Britain, either escaping from a dictatorship, driven by the desires of the heart, looking for a better future or motivated to gain a high profile education. This is just a short encounter with five of them. But there is also Eva Tarr-Kirkhope, who came from Cuba and for already 20 years has been passionately and steadily organizing the ‘London Latin American Film Festival’, probably the pioneer of the many Latin American film festivals that bring the diversity of the Latino film industry to the screens of London and Britain nowadays; Ximena Córdova, of Venezuelan-Bolivian origins, who before embarking on a PhD in Latin American Studies was one of the founders of the Documentary Filmmakers Group (DFG), made a couple of short nonfiction films and lately has documented in video the Carnival of Oruro in Bolivia as an ethnographic support for her academic research. We can also refer to Mónica Rubio, from Colombia, a film editor and colourist at Neath Films, London, but above all a filmmaker in her own right with an alternative and very interesting body of work that explores the crossover between fiction and documentary. One of her most renowned pieces is the short film Chance. Made in her native Colombia, it is a true story about ordinary people who played and won the lottery after finding numbers on frogs and tortoises. The film was presented at various film festivals including Oberhausen, where it got the main prize, and Clermont-Ferrand, considered to be the Mecca of short films.
Be it permanent or temporary, the UK has become home for many Latin American film professionals. One may think this is a land of passage but as new generations are born our roots get settled in the UK for real. As Sergio León puts it, with all his charisma and his experience of 35 years in exile: “Little by little you remain. You think a lot but at the end you don’t have another alternative than cutting your umbilical cord, because it’s very hard to ride two horses at the same time. I have Chile in my heart, and even more Latin America, because our continent is divided politically but not culturally, and in my mind many times I’ve wanted to leave. When I think about the Andes, I logically feel the ‘saudade’ (a nostalgic longing), as the Brazilians would say. When I feel nostalgia for the Andes I go to France and look at the Alps. There’s always an equivalent in life that helps you to heal the wounds of the past. It’s just a matter of keeping walking.” And if you take your steps with a Latin beat, it is even better.
