Running from March 21st to 31st in downtown Toronto, aluCine Latin Film & Media Arts Festival is a Latin-Canadian and international festival showcasing the world’s best in short film, video and media art focusing on works made by Latino/a artists living in Canada and abroad. This year, the festival will focus exploring the influences of African culture in Latin-American contemporary art, also known as Afro-Latinidad.
The festival will open with Juan Andrés Arango’s La Playa D.C. The film will make its Canadian premiere when it opens the film programme of the multi-disciplinary festival. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, writer/director Arango has trained and worked in his homeland, Canada and the Netherlands. He returned to Bogotá to shoot La Playa D.C., his debut feature, which he will personally present on March 27th at 7:30pm at Jackman Hall inside the Art Gallery of Ontario.
La Playa D.C. garnered positive reviews from an international roster of critics when screened in the Un Certain Regard programme at the prestigious Festival de Cannes in May 2012. Arango’s screenplay uses the familiar coming-of-age genre as a canvas on which he paints a visual essay on the social construct of Afro-Latinidad in Colombia – a sampling of this year’s festival theme— as seen through the lives of three teenage brothers: Tomas (Luis Carlos Guevara), Jairo (Andrés Murillo) and Chaco (James Solis). The boys fled to the capital from their formerly- peaceful home on the country’s western seaboard, driven out by the civil war which claimed the life of their father.
aluCine will also feature an exhibition by internationally recognized Cuban artist Juan Sí Gonzales. The exhibition is of his current project: Stay at Home Dad, which will extend into an artist’s talk and a performance. Other programming highlights at this year’s festival include a selection of award-winning short films such as Salon Royal (Argentina), Apocryphal (Mexico), Tela (Brazil), and Luminaris (Argentina). There is also a Shorts for Shorties I series for younger audiences; these are always fun for the the whole familia!
All films are screened with English subtitles. Make sure you take a peek at their full listings of film, installations, performances, and more at alucine.com. There will be plenty to see and do in all of its ten days! Nos vemos!
