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. bu
