Vancouver Latin American Film Festival unveils mix of online and live events from August 26 to September 5
More than half its films are by women and nonbinary directors, with spotlights on Indigenous and queer Latinx movies, as well as Argentina’s Ana Katz
Nudo Mixteco
My Name Is Baghdad
THE VANCOUVER LATIN American Film Festival has unveiled a mix of online and in-person events from August 26 to September 5, with more than half its offerings directed by women and nonbinary filmmakers.
The 19th-annual fest will present more than 60 films from 18 countries in 21 languages—all with English subtitles.
Most of the films will be available for viewing online throughout the festival dates via the CineSend streaming platform.
Starting on August 27, VLAFF will also screen two feature films each evening at The Cinematheque.
Eight films will compete in the New Directors Competition, including five narrative features: Nudo Mixteco (Ángeles Cruz, Mixtec/Mexico), My Name Is Baghdad (Caru Alves de Souza, Brazil); Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine (Alex Piperno, Uruguay); Implosion (Javier Van de Couter, Argentina); 1991 (Sergio Ramírez, Guatemala); and the three documentaries The Calm After the Storm (Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, Colombia), Canela (Cecilia del Valle, Argentina), and Soldier’s Woman (Patricia Wiesse Risso, Peru).
Elsewhere, the 2021 Youth Jury, made up of 20 students from Canada and Latin America, will engage in online dialogues with all of the directors and choose the winner of the Best New Director Award. Meanwhile, 16 shorts will compete in a Short Film Competition.
VLAFF will also present an expanded series of Indigenous films this year, gathered from across the continent. Amid those is a curated program by Ficwallmapu International Festival of Cinema and Indigenous Arts in Wallmapu, the ancestral territory of the Mapuche peoples in southern Chile and Argentina, as well as a revelatory shorts program that focuses on Indigenous youth, girls, women, queers, femmes, and matriarchs, called Future Ancestors: Storytelling as Ceremony.
Other highlights include the ¡Activismo! section’s The Spokeswoman (La Vocera) (Luciana Kaplan, Mexico), about María de Jesús “Marichuy” Patricio Martínez of the Nahua Nation, who in 2018 became the first Indigenous woman ever to run for the presidency of Mexico.
As part of Canada Looks South, which showcases the work of Latin-Canadian filmmakers, look for the films Fauna, the arthouse feature film by award-winning Mexican-Canadian director Nicolás Pereda. Short films in the same program include Jatun LLaxta, Noh Kaah... (Marcos Arriaga, Toronto/Peru), Unarchive (Cecilia Araneda, Winnipeg/Chile), With Time (Eva Urrutia, Montreal/Argentina), Solitude (Yoel Ortega, Vancouver/Cuba), and Sol (Andy Alvarez, Vancouver/Colombia), and many more.
There’s also a dynamic series of queer Latinx films that includes three features with gender nonconforming and trans leads: My Name is Baghdad (Caru Alves de Souza, Brazil), Valentina (Cássio Pereira dos Santos, Brazil), and the documentary Canela (Cecilia del Valle, Argentina).
Elsewhere, look for a series spotlighting Ana Katz, one of Argentina’s leading indie directors, featuring the Canadian premiere of her absurdist drama The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet (El perro que no calla) and her 2018 dramedy Florianópolis Dream. Katz will be on hand for an online artist talk and dialogue during the festival.
And don’t miss the Canadian premiere of The Best Families, a dark comedy by Peruvian director Javier Fuentes-León (see the intriguing trailer below), and A Diamond is for Viridiana, a screening and online talk to mark the 60th anniversary of Spanish-Mexican director Luis Buñuel’s gothic masterpiece Viridiana.
More info and Earlybird Festival Passes and Ticket Packs are on sale now here. Individual tickets for both online and in-person screenings will go on sale on August 5.
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