Access to a wide variety of films is just one of the advantages of living in the Bay Area. Whether retrospectives or circuits of directors in museums, debut films being shown at festivals or Hollywood and Indiewood-style premieres, there are cinematic jewels in various languages and genres just waiting to be discovered like hidden treasures.
At the beginning of the year, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts presented Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Acosta’s “There is no Change,” a documentary about French singer Jeanne Balibar. More than just a film, it is a cinematic meditation about the arduos and magically creative process of performing in a recording studio.
In May Wandering Cinema premiered the Peruvian documentary “Saicomania” about the pioneering ‘60s garage rock band Los Saicos.
The International Film Festival of the month of May, which was presented by the San Francisco Film Society, showed a very nice documentary directed by a young Mexican/ Salvadorian woman called “The Smallest Place.” The film uses an original approach to narrate the consequences of the war in the pueblo of Cinquera, El Salvador.
Director Patricio Guzman brought his masterpiece “Nostalgia for the Light” to the festival. The film revisits Chile’s collective memory while making a parallel connection to the cosmos. The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley also took the opportunity to show a retrospective of Guzman’s entire film career.
In commercial cinema, there was the Argentine thriller “Carancho,” a film that touches on the desperate circumstances in the decade after the Argentine economic collapse.
The Festival of Independent Cinema’s Indie fest delighted us with two horror and fantasy films: “Sad Trumpet Ballad” from Basque director Alex de la Iglesia, and “We Are What We Are” by Mexican director Jorge Grau. The same festival also screened “Nuns with Guns,” a fun grindhouse film produced in California by Joseph Guzman.
In June, Peruvian director Javier Fuentes Leon screened his “Entrecorrientes” at the annual Frameline Film Festival. The film, which was a crowd favorite, won an award at the Sundance Film Festival. The Chilean film “Old Cats” was also shown at this festival. It is the third film by Pedro Peirano and Sebastian Silva, the famous directors responsible for “La Nana.”
By autumn, the work of Filipino filmmaker Brillante Mendoza was presented in San Francisco at the Mission Cultural Center for the Arts and YBCA, respectively. The films “Serbis” and “Lola” were two unforgettable stories that serve as an excellent representation of Third World cinema.
The Latino Film Festival organized by Cine Más, presented its third edition during one week of film across various locations. Titles like the Venezuelan “Habana Eva” by Fina Torres and the charming Panamanian film “Following the Stars” by Iris Disse were beautiful in their simplicity. In the local sphere, the short film “Magician,” which was produced in Richmond Calif., was also screened at the festival.
Another local film that screened in October was Juan Banderas’ “Attack of the Fighting Zombies,” a fun exercise in terror B-movies, which was produced in Hayward.
In September, The Mexican film “Las Supersonicas” was shown at the MCCLA.
In the meantime, the San Francisco Film Society hired Federico Veiroj from Uruguay as resident director for a month. His Film “XXX” had been presented months before at the International Film Festival, and his debut film “Acne” was being shown just a few years before that at the Castro Theatre.
In the month of September the SFFS also showed “Puzzle,” the debut film by Argentinian director Natalia Smirnoff. “Puzzle” features actress Maria Onetto who starred in “The Woman Without a Head” by Lucrecia Martel. Onetto also acted in “Octubre,” a Peruvian film that recently has been nominated as the Oscar selection for Peru this year.
In reference to new directors, the YBCA and later the Pacific Film Archive showed a retrospective piece about the work of young Mexican director Nicolas Pereda, who has created a variety of films over the past five years.
And just this month, YBCA also showed “Chico y Rita,” an animated Spanish film directed by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal.
2011 was a year with an abundance of Latino cinema throughout the Bay Area. If the main funders continue to be cultural institutions, film festivals and cinema associations, there is hope that the circuits of distribution in this country will continue to diversify their catalogues and include more Latino cinema in commercial theaters.