What do Central American film directors bring to the big screen?

In the films that show the Central American landscape and the dramas that boil in that continental belt of volcanoes, daily dramas converge, such as migration, violence and other abuses that revolutionize the creative engine of film directors.

The Central American environment by itself is not easy terrain to see a locally made film projected on the big screen. The waits from beginning to end of a production are counted in several years.

Making films in Central America and in countries like Guatemala “is like a stubborn decision to tell stories,” he comments to the voice of america the Guatemalan director Andrés Rodríguez, who brought to the film festival “Gala Film Fest: Latin American Innovation”, in Washington, slash a drama that took him seven years of work, recorded in Quiché and Spanish.

“I don’t think my film is experimental. I am trying to narrate in another way. Something that is necessary for our region is to start counting things the way we count them and not the way they tell us we should count them,” explains Rodríguez.

Echoes and challenges

At the other end of the isthmus, the Costa Rican director Natalia Solórzano is committed to the documentary with the film I will move so slowlywhich reflects the issue of immigration in his country and the path that migrants arriving in Costa Rica must take to regularize their situation.

Solórzano says that the difficulties for directors are several, beginning with distribution channels that become scarce for fiction and documentary films in the region. International festivals continue to be a window to show Central American cinema, he said.

This creator also points out the importance of independent distribution initiatives in the countries of the region, which try to pave the way for films produced by Central Americans to reach theaters and be seen in their own lands.

“Distribution in Latin America is quite difficult for us, especially for independent films, of which we are the majority, and even more documentary films; it is a very intricate world where it is very difficult to get your film in national theaters”, explains Natalia .

Real life in the movies, the son of a hitman

Young Mexican director Gian Cassini compares the environment for filmmaking in Mexico to what his Central American colleagues are experiencing, but despite the advances, the road is not clear either.

His personal search film took him nine years to make. eat it It ends up being a cathartic effect for his own life, as the son of a single mother who embarked on finding and meeting his father.

Of those things in real life that are stories for the movies, Cassini ends up meeting his father, a hitman, asshole and victim in the war against drugs that has mourned thousands of Mexican families, including the one on his paternal side. .

Being the son of a hired killer and telling that story initially horrified his family, due to the risks involved in the project.

The film, which has moved around festival circuits, appeals to the viewer’s conscience to review repetitive patterns of violence. “I am interested in generating dialogues that are important to me,” Cassini told VOA.

women count

Salvadoran director Brenda Vanegas finds a niche in the subject of women and the effects of the absence left by migrations in her own life with the feature film before the rain. She is the first Salvadoran woman to direct a fiction film that was presented for the first time in the United States.

“Looking back at ourselves is very relevant,” says the director, whose piece also took more than five years of work.

The curator of the exhibition of Central American films Carlos Gutiérrez, who from New York with the project Tropical Cinema tries to look at the region’s productions, comments to VOA that Central American cinema is producing increasingly better films, not only in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of the quality of the productions, and that it has already managed to get slots in renowned international festivals.

However, he recognizes that within the region there are still enormous barriers to overcome so that the public assumes these proposals as their own.

“Without dada we are in a great moment” for productions in Central America, said Rodriguez, who with this edition of the festival in Washington celebrated 11 uninterrupted years of bringing Latin American cinema to the US capital.

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