In the city of Havana, Cuba, the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema was held from December 1 to 11. With more than 2,000 registered works, the Festival gathered cinema directors, producers, and professionals from across the Region. This year, a record 9 of the 15 selected films for the Latin America competition were directed by women.
This festival was inaugurated in 1979 with the aim of promoting the regular meeting of Latin American filmmakers who with their work enrich the artistic culture of the Region, ensure the joint presentation of fiction films, documentaries, cartoons, and current events, and contribute to the international diffusion and circulation of the main and most significant productions of Latin American cinematographies. Ever since then, the Festival has been a fixed date for Latin American filmmakers and a great opportunity to showcase the newest creations of cinema in the Region to an international audience.
SIGNIS has been present at the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema for several years and 2022 was no exception. The jury spent several days seeing, analyzing, and debating the new scripts, narratives, and aesthetic proposals that are currently being used to address stories that, in most productions, are told from the perspective of adolescents and young people, changing significantly the traditional structure of cinema.
The jury was made up of Alexandra Noboa from Ecuador, Rachel Diez and Armando Nuñez from Cuba, who decided to reward the film “Argentina, 1985” by Santiago Mitre, for articulating from a significant aesthetic invoice and a convincing script a speech that defends civility, the values of democracy and human rights in the vindication of one of the best known military dictatorships in the region.