Havana’s Big Screen Party Rages On

Every year in December, the Cuban capital becomes a huge movie theater. There isn’t enough time to watch so many films during the Latin America New Cinema Movie Festival.

More than a hundred flicks will be vying through December 17 for Coral Prizes in a number of categories. This time around, the event will show eight Argentina-made feature presentations out of nearly two dozen fiction films. Daniel Burman’s The Broken Arm, Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl, and Adolfo Aristarain’s Roma are some of the standouts.

Cuba will compete with A Perfect Wrong Love, directed by Gerardo Chijona. Uruguay’s Whiskey, directed by Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, and Period And Line by Venezuela filmmaker Elia Schneider will also enter the contest.

Motorcycle Diaries, a U.S. film of Brazilian director Walter Salles, tells the story of a young Ernesto Guevara, the larger-than-life revolutionary, while Maria Full Of Grace You Are by Joshua Marston, also from the United States, will be in theaters around town.

In the category of short-length films and documentaries, Mexico leads the pack with ten productions, including Heaven And Eden (Manuel Cañibe) and Ground Zero (Carolina Rivas). Brazil’s Stray Bullet (Victor Lopes) and Isaura (Alex Sernambi) are two of its six presentations in this category. Cuba with four, and Argentina, Chile and Venezuela with two apiece, will be in the battle for top honors.

This year’s festival will pay tribute to Chilean writer Pablo Neruda, Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier and Spanish poetess Maria Zambrano in their 100th birthdays.

The festival has also arranged special presentations of German, Danish, Italian, French, Spanish, Swiss and independent American filmmakers, as well as flashbacks devoted to Mexican moviemaker Felipe Cazals and French director Francois Truffaut.