Overview

The International Latino Cultural Center (formerly Chicago Latino Cinema) celebrates its 16th Chicago Latino Film Festival with more than 100 films, visiting directors, panel discussions, photography exhibitions and much more. The Festival runs March 31-April 12, 2000 at Water Tower Theaters and Facets Multimedia.

The Festival presents films of all genres that reflect the diversity of Latino culture from Latin America, Portugal, Spain and the United States. Several films are making their debut at the Festival including a few World Premiere films. Encore presentations of some of the Festival's more popular films will be shown on Thursday, April 13.

The Festival has several events geared to filmmakers and others working in the industry. On Sunday, April 2 the Festival will feature Made in America, a special segment featuring four groundbreaking Latino films made in the U.S. On Monday, April 3 HBO will hold panel discussions geared toward filmmakers interested in marketing their films. Also, as part of the Women in Film segment, a panel will be held with visiting women directors, actors, and producers discussing issues facing women in the industry.

Opening Night kicks off the Festival on Friday, March 31 at the Art Institute of Chicago with the feature film The Girl of Your Dreams by Fernando Trueba, director of Belle Epoque. This dark comedy is infused with love affairs and stark realizations as a director and his crews leave Spain in the midst of Civil War to shoot a musical in Germany only to awaken to an anti-Semitism movement. Penelope Cruz stars as the dazzling Macarena who sparks the interest of many men. Festivities begin at 6:00 p.m. with the film presentation following.

Noche Mexicana takes place Wednesday, April 5 at The Field Museum with the feature film Give Me Power, a bold comedy about a penniless filmmaker fed up with the crime in Mexico City. The film's stars, Demian Bichir and Cecilia Suarez (of Mexico's #1 blockbuster, Sex, Power and Tears), will make special appearances along with the director, Fernando Sarinana. Festivities begin at 6:00 p.m. with the film presentation following.

A Night of Spain is Saturday, April 8 with the film presentation of Park Bench, a look into the life of one man's hopes of meeting the love of his life by sitting at the same park bench and same bar table. The film begins at 7:00 p.m. at Meridian WaterTower Theaters with a reception following at Instituto Cervantes located at the John Hancock building.

Closing Night Fiesta concludes the Festival on Wednesday, April 12 at the Bank One Center (formerly First Chicago Center). Argentinean actor Federico Luppi will receive the "Gloria Award," (the International Latino Cultural Center's Lifetime Achievement) for contributing his acting talents to the industry for 30 years. Luppi stars in six films shown during the Festival including Closing Night's presentation of Fading Memories, the story of a writer voluntarily living in exile who returns to his hometown in Spain after learning of an impending flood that could destroy it. The film presentation begins at 6:30 p.m. with a reception immediately following.

Other special events during the Festival include HBO Night, a private party and special salute to HBO; a five-film Amazon Series held in conjunction with the Shedd Aquarium; Solmares, a photo retrospective of the Mexican Revolution as seen by photojournalist Agustin V. Casasola; a photographic exhibition of stills from the films of the great Mexican cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa, and special meet-and-greet sessions with visiting directors.

As part of community outreach, the Festival provides free weekday matinees for elementary and high school students. The Festival formed a partnership with Chicago Public Schools to reach more than 5,000 students for the Matinee Program. With special support provided by the Academy Foundation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, students can experience the rich diversity of Latino culture through films.

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Argentinean Focus

The 16th Chicago Latino Film Festival comes to a close this week with as yet to be announced encore presentations on Thursday, April 13th. After two weeks of more than seventy films coming from across Latin America, the United States, Spain, and Portugal, one can expect the encores will be strong.

Among the national cinemas whose representatives will certainly be vying for the encores is that of Argentina. Eleven films from the country were listed in the catalogue, and others listed under such countries as Chile and Spain featured personnel from or took place in Argentina. Several of these, including Time for Revenge, in which the actor portrays a working class man who fakes muteness, featured veteran actor Federico Luppi, who received a lifetime achievement award from the International Latino Cultural Center, which co-produces the festival. Three of the newer Argentine films stand out as well. One is La Nube (The Cloud), directed by veteran Fernando Solanas, a playful yet morosely serious story about governmental duplicity, particularly in relation to public funding for the theatre and for universal pensions, though with implications for many other issues as well. Shot in a lush blue-and-white palette, the film evokes the colors and moods of a land where it is always raining and nothing works the way it should. The two others deal directly with the military government of 1976 to 1983: La Cara del Angel (The Face of the Angel) and Garage Olimpo. Both are much more explicitly serious films.

La Cara del Angel (The Face of the Angel), written and directed by Pablo Torre, directly depicts the "dirty war" period of savage abandon from the 1976 coup until 1983 after the disaster of the Malvinas war. Indebted in narrative form to a fairy-tale by Hans Christian Anderson, it is a searing coming of age story based in part on Torre's personal history.

In the streets of Buenos Aires, a civilian protest march is savagely supressed by a military patrol. A woman snaps photos of the supression, recognizing its leader as the father of her nephew. She shows the pictures to her sister, who she realizes the man thought she was. One day while the sister is out, the man shows up with a gang and, in cold blood, murders his former lover. He hunts for their son, Nicolas, who escapes by hiding inside a grandfather clock, an action that echoes what happens in a fairy tale that the aunt had earlier presented in a puppet show for the boy and his mother.

Nicolas and his aunt then flee to the countryside, where Nicolas enrolls in a Catholic school. But as his aunt is slow to realize, the school is in fact a training ground for nationalist fascists, with religion married to a hatred of anyone even slightly different, though Jews are particularly singled out, and Nazis are set up as models to be imitated. The boys, led by Gonzales, imitate their mentors with dirty tricks toward a nonconformist peer called a "mixto," who they regularly kidnap from school events, then beat and torment. Nicolas, who speaks very little, develops an uneasy friendship with the mixto, even confiding in him about what really happened to his parents. A few years later, after the mixto has been taken away, Nicolas and the other tormentors take part in the Malvinas war, which was an attempt by the military government to reclaim a group of islands off its coast from the British. The war is a disaster, for the young men in the film as for the Argentine junta. Afterward, Nicolas heads off to settle an old score.

Interview with Pablo Torre following the screening of his film.

The military education depicted in the Face of the Angel is an implicit background for the third strong Argentine film, Garage Olimpo, a masterpiece directed by Marco Bechis and co-written by Bechis and Lara Fremder. A harrowing, claustrophobic descent into a concentration camp tucked inside an unmarked urban garage, Garage Olimpo reveals the psychological and mechanical devices of torture the military government utilized to destroy anyone who did anything as subversive as teach illiterate adults to read.

Interview with Carlos Echevarria, who plays Felix in Garage Olimpo.

FilmFestivals.com reporter
Ray Privett