The Discovering Latin America Film Festival 2014 reaches new heights and distances on its tenth anniversary
“You are not going to have a nice time,” explains Chilean director Alejandro Fernández Almendras presenting his film To Kill a Man at the gala opening of the Discovering Latin America Film Festival (27 November to 4 December, London). “I am a hideous person. You will have nightmares.”
This is the tenth edition of the DLAFF and the organisers have decided to mark the end of the first decade by making it a markedly bigger, more ambitious event than before. It comes at a time of new life for Latin American cinema, since the start of the new millennium has seen what critics have dubbed the Mexican Renaissance, while Brazil has had its own retomada, or ‘retaking’, of cinematic glory.
This was also the year that Gravity made Mexican Alfonso Cuarón the first Latin American to win an Oscar for Best Director. The collection of films here, though, invites you on a different route than into outer space via the international blockbuster circuit. Perhaps appealing to the European spirit of exploration, their promise is the discovery of Latin America itself, via its films.
These are solid, character-based dramas and quality productions awarded by various international film festivals. As a group, they show the complexities of social relationships amid an often strikingly dramatic natural environment.
To Kill a Man, the opener mentioned above, is thus a bleak and indeed nightmarish tale of random bullying and police indifference. The true events on which it is based serve to frame the film’s central concerns of revenge and guilt. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival, and strips back the dialogue and action to present an often wordless picture within the wilds of the Chilean coastline – what its director Almendras says is the violence of human nature.
Moving over to Argentina, tonight sees the premiere of Lucia Puenzo’s adaptation of her novel Wakolda, titled The German Doctor, set in 1960 about the friendship between a 12-year-old girl and a doctor who, it transpires, is the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. From Brazil, The Way He Looks, this year’s feature film winner at the Berlin International Film Festival, is showing tomorrow night and reveals a tale of teenage love and independence.
Argentina, Brazil and Cuba are the best-represented out of the ten countries with films on show here, but my favourite film so far has been Distance (Sergio Ramírez), which is from Guatemala. It features a middle-aged man who hitchhikes 150 kilometres to find his daughter, who was kidnapped 20 years previously by the army and now lives in an indigenous community. He undertakes the difficult journey so as to fulfil his promise to give her the journal he kept over the years, in which he writes of his resistance and endurance. Blending the political and the personal, the film is compelling and warm-hearted, but never overwrought in its emotional depth, choosing instead to show how the tender tenacity of apparently small gestures can overcome whatever distances lie between people.
The festival also features a visit from Luis Ospina who is showcasing The Cali Group. These artists, writers and filmmakers based in Cali, Colombia, have sought to combine culture with questions of social revolt and popular life since the 1970s.
It is also much to be admired that the film festival is itself directly involved in improving social conditions. The proceeds from the festival are being donated this year to Casa Alianza, an organisation that works to support trafficked girls in Guatemala.
Photo Credits: DLAFF 2014