It seems that the fourth month of the year wants to give competition to December when it comes to films. With the arrival of April starts in Havana the ICAIC Young Sample 2014, which returns as the most important thermometer to the production of new filmmakers in the country. The same month also culminates with the International Low-Budget Film Festival in Gibara, the magical little town north of Holguin, where Humberto Solas not only filmed part of some of his best known films, but also created the event more than a decade ago, with the intention of opening spaces to a cinema devoid of economic budgets, but not of art.
Over fifty works compete in this thirteenth edition of the Young Sample, which starts next April the first, and ends on Sunday, 6. Among the 178 works that were registered there are competing materials 29 fiction films, 16 documentaries and 11 short animated films, all made in 2013, as Marisol Rodriguez, director of the event, announced.
This is without doubt, the greatest merit of this meeting where traditionally creators are competing across the country (this time from 10 provinces), in most cases with no professional cameras or even recorded with phones, but-sometimes- with very good artistic making.
The Sample, which remains largely dominated by graduates or students of the Broadcasting Faculty of ISA, the Arts and Letters faculty of the University of Havana, or the Institute of Design, does not exclude, but rather promotes creators emerging across the country. This time stands out the recent promotion and participation of the creative group of Nuevitas, in the northern Camagüey, now nationally recognized or of the young peasant, who a few years ago, won with a material animation impossible to achieve by any creator dependent of technology.
Therefore, the Sample comes not only as a catalyst for display and distribution of these materials and their authors, but as a space for learning and knowledge, highly valued by those who arrive from circuits outside the capital. Becoming a space that values the product regardless of the equipments was its founding purpose and still lives among its organizers, as they confirmed to the press.
This time the theoretical space of the Sample receives the speaker Kalmurry Simon, executive director of POV (Point of view), North American platform for the exhibition of independent films.
Kalmurry, Yumey Besu , event producer , said, will lecture on the path of Closing Distances , a traveling documentary program between the U.S. and Cuba , organized by the Americas Media Initiative. The conference, she said, six will take place Sunday at 2 : 30 pm at the Film Fresa y Chocolate Cultural Center
In this edition of the traditional spaces continue as Moving Ideas the Jameson in short competition, while the theoretical event includes photography workshop that Chilean Pablo Insunza will teach and the lecture, that on the same topic, Chilean-Danish director Manuel Claro will deliver. Without a doubt one of the most important areas of the event will be the Film Making space in which several filmmakers look for sponsorship for the realization of their projects. In this competition were born many of the winners in previous editions of the show.
The President of ICAIC, Robert Smith explains in its introductory remarks to the catalog of the event the importance of alternative and independent mechanisms to catalyze the production of new creative work. In this regard he said: it was little more than a decade ago, when the Sample of New Filmmakers was founded, not everyone understood the ICAIC proposal to create a new scenario aimed at promoting an incipient production of young people trying to make movies from the margins of institutions. “
This time he will pay tribute to the late director Daniel Diaz Torres, with the screening of some of his films and the debate Las peliculas de Daniel. Also they will have a special section devoted to Latin American ICAIC Newsreel with the presentation of the 8 newly restored works bequeathed by Santiago Álvarez and present in a special way as part of the collateral program the most recent productions of filmmaker Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti: Crematorio, En fin…El mal and Crematorio II. Más allá del bien y del …mar.
Also highlights the return to competition of director Adolfo Mena Cejas, overall winner in the previous edition of the event, introducing the short film “Miénteme bien Jackie Chang”. This material was co-directed with Grethel Castillo and was sponsored, among others, by the Embassy of Norway, which recreates the encounter in Havana’s Chinatown of Chan Lee (Victor Leon) and Gloria (Elizabeth Devesa ) who celebrate the new year together , never imagining the events that lie ahead in the upcoming calendar.
The other film event taking place this April is the International Low-budget Festival in Gibara, already without Humberto Solas, which seemed it was to disappear after the struggles for permanence. The truth is that no longer will be held for a week as was traditionally the case , but for three days and not annually , but biennial , although it is worth remembering that the event returns to the Villa Blanca de los Cangrejos without getting rid of the doubts raised by its uncertain future .
The Festival will take place April 25-27 and between core activities include tributes to the actress Luisa María Jiménez , filmmaker Jorge Molina, and the recently deceased Santiago Feliu . Also continue evoking the memory of Humberto Solas and Adria Santana, with the delivery of two separate awards in their honor, the first of them to the best film in competition and a second to an actress distinguished by the work of a lifetime, which this case, it’s been said will be delivered to Edith Massola .
In this edition Lester Hamlet, its director since the last edition, announced 47 works are competing (4 video art, 17 short and one full feature fiction films, 17 documentaries and 8 long documentaries). In addition, two collateral samples are presented: the first Molina’s Night, with nine short movies by filmmaker Jorge Molina (eventually a juror in the event) and Premio Alexis, which includes a screening of works from the Bogota Film Festival .
It stands out the presentation of the exhibition The actress, a sample in which the Spanish artist Pedro Coll shares the unprejudiced view of his lens to a “very bold” Luisa María Jiménez, evoking from her poses the photographic aesthetic of the 1950s with all the glamor of a beautifully histrionic Cuban actress.
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