Latin live in film

The Ibero-American Film Festival opened in Port of Spain last week with an award-winning Peruvian film, Moon Heart, which is vying for an Academy Award for best international feature film.

The festival brings us an array of cine genres from across the Spanish-speaking world – 11 films in all, one for each weekday evening until it ends on December 20, and featuring films and documentaries from Brazil, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia and Panama. For the geographically challenged, Europe’s Iberian peninsula includes Portugal and Spain and Portuguese-speaking Brazil is part, therefore, of Ibero-America.

For film lovers this festival is a treat, not least because it is free, but also, cinema is highly developed in the Latin world and has always made its mark, going back many decades, to the 1890s, and the 1900s with the famous Spanish-Mexican director Luis Bunuel, who died in the 1980s and was one of the most influential directors in the history of world cinema. He set the screen ablaze with his surreal, sometimes shocking films, very much as the Spaniard Pedro Almodovar does today with his modern and bold reflections upon the strangeness of life and the people who live it. Who could forget Talk to Her or
Volver?

The continual waves of cinema in Spain and Latin America have produced many classics, but the objective of TT’s Ibero-American Film Festival is to show the work of new directors who are dealing with themes that the participating countries hope will bring us in TT closer to them. There is still insufficient contact between us and our continental neighbours, and we know relatively little of their societies and culture. Certainly, film is an excellent vehicle for simultaneous enlightenment and entertainment across languages and peoples, and the stories they tell can pack a huge emotional punch when they express our oneness as human beings, notwithstanding our differing environments and circumstances.

The festival is well timed, because in the last few days Argentina and Peru have been thrust onto the world’s political stage. Peru got its first female president on Wednesday, Dina Boluarte, the former vice president. She stepped into the breach after an amazingly bold move by the left-wing President Castillo, who, after impeachment, decided to suspend the Constitution and dissolve Parliament, and was taken into police custody. The TV clips of Castillo’s intended power grab show a man with a steely jaw but whose shaking hands could hardly hold his script still as he declared “the establishment of an exceptional government aimed at re-establishing the rule of law and democracy” and devising a new constitution. Were the impeachment charges true, or is he just another dictator?

The perpetual political swing from left to right and vice versa and corruption claims that gave Peru no fewer than three presidents in one week in 2020 must be excellent fodder for nurturing a young filmmaker's creative ambitions.

In a peculiar juxtaposition, also last week. but in Argentina, history was made by another woman, no less than a former first lady, president and now serving vice president. The controversial Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was handed down a six-year prison sentence for fraud, having embezzled US$1billion during her presidency – the first serving leader to be convicted. She received a lifetime ban from holding political office, too.

Kirchner belongs to the Peronist tradition of powerful, politically ambitious women on the coattails of their presidential husbands. Argentina’s politics has been a fertile ground for international creative success. based on one of the most famous politicians worldwide. Leaving aside the moustachioed Emiliano Zapata and his revolution that made Mexican history the stuff of long-lasting box-office fame, Juan Peron, the multiple-times Argentine president of the mid-late 1900s and his wife Eva Peron have been most immortalised on the silver screen. In the 1990s, Madonna played Eva alongside a star-studded cast in Evita, based on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running stage musical, the song Don’t Cry for Me Argentina becoming an international hit.

A defining aspect of Latin American cinema is its vagaries, akin to the fortunes of the various countries. The abundant historical narrative on Latin American film bears this out. Depending on what political and social upheavals and external factors pertain, cinema has thrived or waned, not unlike TT.

Developing the TT film industry was an active pursuit of previous PNM administrations, and a fair investment was made in training, scriptwriting and funding filmmaking, which built capacity. It went along with the introduction of film as a discipline at the UWI and the birth of the TT Film Festival. The focus today, however, is on attracting foreign film crews to TT as a film location.

Like us, then, Latin American cinema has its moments, most notably the 1940s, 1960s, and 1990s onwards with the likes of Alfonso Cuaron, who revitalised the Mexican film industry, historically winning an Oscar for best director for
Roma (2018), plus nine more Academy Award nominations.

Unlike us though, Latin America now invests in the industry and transnational co-productions are the norm. You can see the benefits of that at the current festival at Nalis at 6pm on weekdays.

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