The 10th Discovering Latin America Film Festival

As with music and literature, Latin America is a continent only partly known to the filmgoing public. The cultural powerhouses of Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia get the lion’s share of the world’s attention, while the likes of Peru and Chile continue to put out accomplished films that never reach the global festival circuit, let alone our cinemas. One of the joys of the Discovering Latin America Film Festival, which celebrates its first decennium this year, is that it goes out of its way to redress this imbalance.
The DLAFF bandwagon has been gathering speed these last few years, with the festival emerging as one of London’s most varied and carefully curated. Though the vast majority of featured movies have yet to secure a UK release, most of them have scooped gongs at festivals in their home continent, and many of them are on track to represent their country at the Academy Awards. Some of the names featured on this year’s programme will be familiar to art house habitués: Argentine indie darling Lucia Puenzo, or Chile’s Alejandro Fernández Almendras, whose To Kill A Man – which opens the fest – made a splash at Sundance in January. Others offer what may be your first taste of Guatemalan or Ecuadorean cinema.
Among the 20-odd films that make up this tenth edition, we’re particularly psyched about Rubén Mendoza’s Dust on the Tongue, in which an ailing man takes his grandchildren out onto the Colombian plains and asks them to kill him; Daniel Ribeiro’s The Way He Looks, about burgeoning gay desire among Brazilian teens; and Robert Petri’s Semper Fidel, which tracks an American marine’s efforts to uncover his family tree in Havana. The programme is loosely tied together by an emphasis on social and domestic drama, and the continent’s recent historical experience is a running theme. Many of the represented filmmakers will be on hand to give Q&A sessions, helping the organisers to shed light on this undervalued corner of the film world.
The festival runs from November 27th to December 4th at the Odeon Covent Garden and Tate Modern. Some of the proceeds will go toward healthcare provision for female victims of human trafficking in Guatemala, in association with the charity Casa Alianza.