AluCine Latin Film & Media Arts Festival
The 12th annual AluCine Latin Film and Media Arts Festival occupies the Revue Cinema between November 17 and 19, and will feature over 40 films, videos, and new-media works by Latin-American artists and Canadians of Latin-American heritage. Primarily a showcase for short films and experimental works, the festival aims to give expression to a rapidly developing worldwide community of independent audiovisual artists with roots in Latin-American communities.
Promising programming highlights include intriguing opening night selection The Mysterious Presages of León Prozak, a hallucinatory feature-length animation from Columbian artist Carlos Santa. Tantalizingly if nonsensically described as the outcome of León Prozak’s decision to lend “his mind to Mefistópheles for a circus act,” the film is an allegorical collage of hand-drawn imagery, and apparently took 10 years to produce. In addition to the trailer embedded above, a five-minute excerpt is available here. On Friday, November 18, AluCine will also present Santa’s previous works, Deep Ocean, The Dark Forest, and The Passenger of the Night.
Following Santa’s Mysterious Presages on opening night is “To Record, To Retell, To React,” a series of shorts chronicling the legacies of government brutality in Chile and Mexico. Aras Galca’s Town Without Memory revisits the events of October 2, 1968, when soldiers opened fire on student protesters in Mexico City. Titans, by Chilean filmmaker Edison Cajas, depicts the moral debasement of an intelligence service agent under the Pinochet regime. Topo Gigio is Dead, from David Miranda, is likewise concerned with Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship, but explores its bitter contemporary vestiges.
Less politically charged is “Love, Life, and Death in the Streets of Brazil”, a programme spotlighting four Brazilian filmmakers, which screens on Saturday, November 19. The Sky Downstairs is a beautifully bittersweet animated short from Leonardo Cata Preta, about a boy with a muscular defect that leaves him hunched forward in a permanent slouch. Unable to raise his head, he habitually snaps polaroids of the sky, and one day makes a bizarre, transformative discovery. Also screening in the series is Fernando Rick’s Ivan, a redemptive tale about an embittered actor reduced to distributing leaflets on the streets of São Paulo. According to AluCine’s synopsis, Ivan’s only friends are a transvestite and a Michael Jackson impersonator, which makes Rick’s revelation that he was inspired by David Lynch and Gaspar Noé all the more fascinating.
For synopses, schedules, and ticketing information for all AluCine screenings and events, visit the festival’s website.