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.

The Catholic Church has had a bad press of late with a series of damaging child-abuse scandals and shameful cover-ups. Its opposition to contraception and abortion, its subjugation of women and its homophobia have also come under fire. EvelioRosero, prize-winning author of The Armies, offers a unique take on the Catholic Church’s institutional failings in this surreal portrait of one of its Colombian outposts.

For 22 years, the Colombian capital city has hosted the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogota, a celebration of the dramatic arts. The festival takes place every two years and, until her death in 2008, was produced and directed by Fanny Mikey, an Argentine actress of international renown who first created the festival in 1988.

The annual International Poetry Festival in Medellin, Colombia, is the largest of its kind anywhere in the world.  It has an interesting origin, in that it was born out of the misery and frustration of the early 1990s, when the country was drenched in violence and corruption from the drugs wars, and Medellin was the world’s most violent city and the centre of the global drugs trafficking business.

Santiago Gamboa (Bogotá, 1965) is one of the finest Latin American writers of his generation. Last September he was awarded the La Otra Orilla Literary Award for his novel Necropolis. La Otra Orilla is a literary imprint within Grupo Editorial Norma that focuses on Hispanic literature. The prize has been offered since 2005 and it rose from $30,000 to $100,000 in 2009. It is given to an unpublished novel and it guarantees the publication of the work in Latin America and Spain.