Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

This year the London Latin American Film Festival celebrates twenty-five years of Havana’s International TV and Film School, presenting the highlights from the past quarter century of one of the most influential of Cuban cultural institutions, alongside the best of this year's films, which reflect the changing priorities of Cuba's young filmmakers.

Miss Bala    
Mexico/2011
Dir: Gerardo Naranjo
Running time 113 minutes

The violence of Mexico’s drug cartels is impinging daily on the lives of ordinary people. Since 2006, decapitations, corpses left hanging from bridges and body parts found on the beach are just some of the reported atrocities.

A study of cinema in Uruguay cannot be realistically undertaken without considering the country’s geographical and socio-political position, which has provided a backdrop against which modern Uruguayan film-makers have developed their craft.

The main thread throughout Icíar Bollaín’s film Even the Rain can be summed up by Czech writer Milan Kundera’s renowned quote “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. 

Latin American cinema has really come of age since about the turn of the millennium, though its origins go back to the 1940s and 1950s, the so-called Golden Age of the medium.  The centres of production have predominantly been in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Cuba. 

Cinema d’auteur originated in the 1950s as a means of artistic cinematic expression that placed the emphasis less on telling an objective dramatic tale and more on expressing the director’s personal vision using the range of cinematic techniques at his disposal. 

In the aftermath of the news of Néstor Kirchner’s death, the media is highlighting this state leader’s mobilization to challenge the IMF while trying to rescue the country from a crisis which was comparable to the Depression with an unemployment rate of 21%. Such an act of defiance is seen by some as the result of an approach whereby social democracy and nationalism serve as the main ideological drives.

Pablo Larrain is a Chilean film director and a leading light in cinema d’auteur, a movement characterized by the director’s personal vision suffusing his cinematic output, making it instantly recognizable as the product of one particular director or producer.  Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski are familiar examples of this, and nowadays Larrain has emerged in Latin American cinema as an exponent of a unique style that incorporates an idiosyncratic sense of dark humour that seduces audiences with its mix of humour and chilling undertones.

Non-fiction cinema has a long tradition in Latin America. Probably the first deliberate attempts of registering reality not just to preserve it on film or as an experiment  –but to express a point of view about the situations that were taken place– date back as far as 1910 during the Mexican Revolution. For instance, this social upheaval had a big impact in the development of cinema in the region and is considered to be one of the first historical events to be documented on film.

Sergio León spreads conviction and enthusiasm in every thought that he shares with me. He arrived to the UK 35 years ago; he was 27 years old, he was married and had a son. Life was going normally for Sergio in Chile. He was working as a TV producer and he was part of the team that made the advertising campaign for the government of Salvador Allende.