Cinema: in Toulouse, Cinélatino, head in the stars

The poster for the 2022 edition © Cinelatino

Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec

5 mins

The Meetings of Latin American Cinemas raised the curtain on Friday evening in the beautiful spaces of the Capitole and the nearby Cinémathèque, with guests, volunteers and friends of the festival, in the celebration of reunion after two years of distancing imposed by the health crisis.

A 34th edition also marked by several anniversaries: that of the review Cinémas d'Amérique Latine and meetings of Cinema under construction, two concrete and essential supports for "

 " in Latin America.

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From our special correspondent in Toulouse,

Next to the Saint-Sernin basilica, a jewel of Romanesque architecture, the Cuban filmmaker Miguel Coyula, who came to present his astonishing and remarkable film

, lends himself to a photo session under the sun.

Another generation, another look, the Chilean documentary filmmaker

is the guest star of this 34th edition.

Forced to stay in Paris where he lives due to a health problem, he nevertheless participates virtually in the debates that follow his films or in meetings like the one this Saturday on the theme "From memory to the stars" around his film

, and more generally around a work that documents the present time while

and claiming the subjectivity of the documentary gaze.

The festival offers a complete retrospective of the work of Patricio Guzman, a regular at the place, from the trilogy

to the

and

.

We bet that his next film, currently being graded, will find a good place on the screens of the Rencontres de Cinélatino. 

Cinémathèque de Toulouse, March 26: in video, the Chilean director Patricio Guzman and in the room the astrophysicist Thierry Contini (G), Marion Gautreau and Ignacio Del Valle, teacher-researchers.

© Isabelle Le Gonidec RFI

The festival has a good place in Chile, current events oblige, as the recent investiture of the new president Gabriel Boric opens up prospects with many directors present on the some 80 guests of the

. more than 130 fictions or documentaries according to its different sections, competition, discoveries and

, another look, dedicated to the young Argentinian director Matias Piñeiro.

He is the author of a work little known to the general public, which explores acting, acting in the theater, acting in the cinema, acting in life, in particular revisiting the work of Shakespeare in his films.

An enlightening interview was devoted to him in the previous issue of the review

since he was invited for the 2021 edition.

Cinemas of Latin America

, the 30 years

A review which celebrates its thirtieth birthday this year, essential to accompany the cinema of the subcontinent and an anniversary issue largely devoted to the question of the conservation, restoration and transmission of Latin American film heritage.

"

It was in 1992, the year of the “discovery” of the Americas, that the review was launched by the organizers of the festival, which had already existed for four years.

It was then a matter of making cinema known as a vector of the cultures of the Latin American sub-continent, in several languages, in French and in Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese.

The review sheds light on the program of the Rencontres but also sheds welcome light on the trends or questions that feed the cinemas of Cuba, Argentina, Brazil or Central America.

The journal's articles are widely open to authors from the sub-continent, filmmakers, critics, journalists or teacher-researchers

 wrote Paulo Antonio Paranagua, journalist and film critic who gave impetus to the critical and theoretical work of his pages.

Published in paper - an originality to which the authors are attached - in black and white, without advertising - except on the back of the cover page and for the benefit of the Occitanie region which supports it financially, and available a few months later in digital version, the magazine occupies a good place among all those who are interested in Latin American cinema.

From the first issues, typewritten, with hand-cut photos and a railroad that ran through all the rooms of the apartment of the Saint-Dizier couple, kingpin of the festival with the first founding members, the magazine if

Cinema is part of the memory and therefore of the identity of a people, and America is the continent where film archives are disappearing the most, Patricio Guzman already warned a few years ago in a previous issue of the magazine.

Lack of interest or culture, lack of money, or for political reasons.

We remember the consternation, a few months ago, in Brazil, during the

.

Cinema under construction, the essential boost

Since the 1990s, many countries have adopted audiovisual and cinema legislation, texts which also govern the preservation of this heritage.

This is the dossier of this new issue of the review, and here we must echo one of the major contributions of the Latin American Cinema Meetings in Toulouse: aid for the creation and distribution of films.

Cinéma en Construction, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, was a pioneering device, since taken up in many festivals: it is a question of supporting Latin American feature films at the post-production stage, assist in their completion and dissemination.

Cinema Under Construction was first launched in collaboration with the San Sebastian festival, thanks to the late

 ;

the Lima film festival then took over. 

, about the life of a Bolivian migrant worker in Argentina, a bitter and harsh film about racism, by Argentinian Israel Adrian Caetano was the first to benefit from this boost.

It is rebroadcast to the public this Sunday at the Cinémathèque.

Many others followed, such as

by the Guatemalan Jayro Bustamante,

by the Venezuelan Mariana Rondon or

by the Brazilian João Paulo Miranda.

A device all the more essential in these times when culture and cinema are precarious by the consequences of the pandemic which has severely affected the Latin American continent.

If resistance has been organized for filming, recalls Francis Saint-Dizier, president of ARCALT, the association organizing the meetings, the commercial distribution circuits take less risk.

Especially since traditionally, for lack of public aid and structured networks such as cinematheques, the distribution circuits of auteur films are fragile.

Thirty years, twenty years... the helping hand of the Rencontres de Toulouse to cinematographic creation still has a bright future ahead of them.

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