Havana’s 25th Latin American Cinema Festival swings for the fences

The Havana Latin American Cinema Festival opened Tuesday with a portfolio of 200 films in which over half that figure will vie for the Coral Awards.

For a ten-day stretch, the Cuban capital will celebrate one of the island nation’s top annual cultural activities. This time around, movie theaters in town will show 45 fiction flicks, 24 premieres, 33 documentaries and 33 cartoons that round off 97 unedited screenplays and 48 posters entering the contest.

In the fiction category, Brazil and Argentina will come with 6 feature presentations each. Both critics and viewers are already putting their smart money on Marcelo Piñeyro’s Kamchatka, Aribel’s Game by Alberto Lecchi; Carandiru by Hector Babenco, and Carlos Diegues’ God Is Brazilian.

Cuba will come armed with its entire yearly production, this time up consisting of four short-length movies and a similar number of feature films (Suite Havana by Fernando Perez; Smelling Oak by Rigoberto Lopez; Between Two Hurricanes, a film of Enrique Colina, and Juan Carlos Tabio’s As Far As You Might Be).

The other contestants are from Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Nicaragua, Peru and Uruguay in all different categories.

In the same breath, organizers are trumpeting special presentations from Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan and Croatia for this year’s festival, plus a sample of award-winning independent movies from the United States

The 25th edition includes an unprecedented section entitled In a Way, fully devoted to female moviemakers. This year’s Lifetime Achievement Award will go to Costa Gavras, the celebrated Greek-French filmmaker who stood out back in the 70s with such Latin America-themed flicks as Z, State of Siege and Missing, and to Argentine photographer Ricardo Aronovich.