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The San Sebastian International Film Festival (Sept. 20-28) has announced the 15 Latin American productions that will compete in the Latin Horizons section of its upcoming 67th edition.
Among the titles competing for the 35,000 euro ($39,195) purse for the director and Spanish distributor are several films that have won top awards at previous A-list festivals this year, and others that have previously participated as projects in various industry sidebars at San Sebastian.
Of the 15, seven are also first or second features eligible to compete for the TCM Youth Award.
Actor Gael Garcia Bernal will screen his second effort as a director, Chicuarotes, a film about two young teens trying to shake off the shackles of the poverty and violence pandemic to Mexico. The pic had a special screening in Cannes this year.
Another actor-turned-director, Argentina’s Romina Paula, marks her helming debut with Again Once Again, in which she also stars. It’s a partly fictional tale about family, motherhood and mid-life crises.
Veteran Chilean director Patricio Guzman presents Cannes screener and L’Oeil d’Or winner The Cordillera of Dreams, which completes a trilogy about the lasting aftershocks on his country of Pinochet’s coup d’etat.
Another veteran, Chile’s Andres Wood, will give his film Spider its European premiere in San Sebastian. The movie looks at the paramilitary movement Patria y Libertad, which was born as a reaction to the government of Salvador Allende.
From Uruguay, Federico Veiroj will present his fifth feature in San Sebastian, The Moneychanger, about a black market cash scheme across three South American countries and based on a well-known novel.
Peruvian brothers Daniel and Diego Vega, previous winners of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize, will premiere La Bronca, a family drama about a young boy who leaves 1990s Peru for Montreal to live with his father and his father’s new Canadian family.
Paula Hernandez, from Argentina, will give her fourth feature, The Sleepwalkers, its European premiere in San Sebastian. The story is about a mother and her teenage daughter who attend a tense family reunion.
Brazilian Alejandro Landes premieres Monos, a Lord of the Flies style tale of guerrilla children taking a North American hostage, which won the Special Jury Prize in the World Cinema Competition at Sundance and played in Berlin’s Panorama, as well.
Younger directors’ efforts in the section include Cuban Armando Capo’s debut feature, August, about a 13-year-old boy in the last days of summer 1994 at the height of the rafters crisis.
Guatemala’s Cesar Diaz will screen his Camera d’Or winner from Cannes Critics Week, Our Mothers, a drama about survivors of the country’s civil war.
Also from Guatemala, Jayro Bustamante will screen two features in the section: Berlin Panorama screener Tremors, about a 40-year-old Evangelical Christian man who falls in love with another man, and Venice premiere La Llorona, about the Guatemalan genocide, which will play as the closing film out of competition.
Another debut feature, The Prince, comes from Sebastian Munoz and tells the story of a 20-year-old imprisoned in 1970s Chile. It will arrive in San Sebastian after premiering in the Critics Week at Venice.
Lucia Garibaldi’s debut feature The Sharks, a coming-of-age drama about the awakening of a young girl’s sexual desire in a seaside town, has been winning awards since it was presented last year in Films in Progress and won best director honors in the World Cinema section of Sundance.
Juan Solanas’ documentary about the struggle to achieve legal abortion in Argentina, Let It Be Law, which had a special screening in Cannes, will screen out of competition.
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