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Pick of the películas |
 DECADENT CONFLICT: Madeinusa The 11th edition of Festivalissimo, the festival of Spanish and Latin American cinema, promises in its press materials “a piñata of talent.” So if you’re looking to see talent spill all over the place and greedily fight off others to gather it up, this is the place to be. The showcase films in this year’s
edition are both from Argentina. The fest opens with El camino de
San Diego, from director Carlos Sorin (noted for last year’s Bombón
el Perro). In the recent tradition of celebrity-worship films, El
camino follows a young man from the provinces who makes a
pilgrimage to Buenos Aires to meet his idol, soccer hero Maradona. In El
aura, directed by Fabian Bielinsky (Nine Queens), an
epileptic taxidermist daydreams of plotting the perfect crime, then
finds his idle fantasies come true when he accidently kills a man on a
hunting trip.
Princesas (Fernando Léon de Aranoa, Spain) is a buddy film of sorts centred on the effects of immigration on the prostitution community; a Spanish working girl and her Dominican colleague become friends despite a cultural rivalry. The film picked up three Goyas (the Spanish Oscars), including Best Actress for newcomer Micaela Nevárez. A prize-winner on the Latin festival circuit, Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa (Peru) tells of a young woman with an inappropriately affectionate father; their conflicts come to a head during a festival of decadence in their small Andean town.  ROAD MOVIE: El camino de San Diego The Québécois update of Romeo and Juliet failed to reach even the heights of Baz Luhrmann, but nobody told Brazil’s Bruno Barreto, who’s made yet another update of the prototypical love story, this time with the inter-family spat based around rival soccer teams. Since the past year has been such a banner year for Latin filmmakers with the triple threat of Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel) and Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men), the festival has thoughtfully programmed selected works of all three directors. The fest is also presenting a program entitled “Los Classicos,” in which two well-regarded 2001 films, La ciénaga (Argentina) and 25 watts (Uruguay), have their Quebec premiere. Fans of freak cinema will want to flock to Jodorowsky, a documentary on the eponymous Chilean filmmaker who made two of the craziest films ever, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, in the ’70s and has since taken on a second career as a comic-book writer. The Latin diaspora north of the border gets a nod in the “Latinos del norte” program, which includes not only some well-regarded recent local films, Sophie Deraspe’s Rechercher Victor Pellerin and Charles Gervais’ ¿¡Revolución!? (a documentary on Venezuela’s wild-card president Hugo Chavez), but also perennial bad boy Larry Clark’s new feature, Wassup Rockers, about a gang of Latino punks in L.A. In addition to these and many more films, the fest has also programmed music concerts and art exhibitions around town. So whether you feel like viewing a bunch of stuff you may never get a chance to see elsewhere, exploring the diversity of Latin culture, or just cinematically escaping winter’s tenacious hold, it’s a piñata worth taking a swing at. FESTIVALISSIMO RUNS
MARCH 1–15 AT THE CINÉMA
DU PARC.
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