‘La Camarista,’ ‘Buenaventura, Mon Amour’ ‘We Are All Sailors’ Top Ventana Sur’s Primer Corte
BUENOS AIRES — Making good on predictions, Lila Avilés “La Camarista,” Jorge Navas’ “Buenaventura, Mon Amour (Somos calentura)” and Miguel Angel Moulet’s “We Are All Sailors” all took two prizes a piece at Ventana Sur’s Primer Corte, one of Latin America’s most prestigious pix-in-post competitions.
Announced Thursday night, the prizes made good on buzz on all three titles coming into Ventana Sur, Latin America’s biggest film market, which wraps Friday in Buenos Aires.
Meanwhile, Ventana Sur also announced awards in its Blood Window, Animation! and Trends sections, where projects and rough-cut productions received a dizzying slew of free-of-charge post-production service prizes and invitations to other events as Ventana Sur’s sections slotted into the international genre, animation and immersive reality festival-market calendar.
At Blood Window, two buzzed-up projects, “El Muglar” and “Eternal White,” won awards in the Beyond the Window co-production forum, while “The Tenants,” from Mexico’s Chava Cartas and “Ojos Grises,” directed by Uruguay’s Santiago Ventura, pretty well cleaned up in Blood Window’s Work in Progress section.
Awards at Animation! were spread across much of the board, with, among feature film projects, ‘Confite,’ ’Pueblo Chico,’ ‘Grimalkin’ and “Noah’s Ark’ all taking prizes. The major takeaway from Animation! however, was that Latin American feature film production is building in a quantity of quality in a big way, Ventana Sur helping to establish the region as a rising power on the world’s toon scene.
From a European viewpoint – and Europe remains a prime market for Latin American art fare – Avilés’ “La Camarista’ was the big winner at Primer Corte, snagging the European Vision Prize granted by, among others, a sales agent – Eric Schnedecker . and Bruno Deloye at Canal Plus’ Cine + whose acquisitions of French pay TV rights are a key to unlocking distribution in France. Written and directed by actress-turned-director Avilés, the European Vision Prize went to a winningly grounded fiction film which treks after a chambermaid on her daily grind around Mexico City’s chicly wood-paneled Hotel Presidente Internacional. But is is also a story which many at Ventana Sur found touching of the search for identity of a person who seems invisible to some clients, is already a mother, but not yet her own person.
Directed and produced by Miguel Angel Moulet, who has described the film as “intimate and violent,” “We’re All Sailors” turns on three Russian sailors whose fishing boat is stranded in Peru’s El Callao port and suddenly have to adapt, finding a life for themselves on dry land.
Seen in rough cut in a version which by general consensus could be tightened considerably, “Buenaventura Mon Amour” reportedly boasts stunning sequences of hip-hop group attempting ti win a competition which would buy it a ticket out of the violent, drug-infested Colombian port of Buenaventura.
There was also an upbeat reaction to “Ella miente,” again judged overlong, as so many movies i rough-cut contests are, but a sweet reflection on latent racism in Dominican society.
The major challenge of Latin American genre is to emerge from a blood-drenched low-budget basement where the most that can be expected are sales to TV or DVD. It may be no coincidence then that two of the winning projects at “Beyond the Window,” Lucila Las Heras’ “The Muglur,” already winner of Blood Window’s 2017 First Feature competition, and Christoph Behl’s “The Eternal White,” go way beyond strict genre, Behl’s thriller emerging as a social allegory for the social impact of big pharmaceutical companies.
VENTANA SUR INDUSTRY PRIZES, 2017
PRIMER CORTE
EUROPEAN VISION PRIZE
“La Camarista” (Lila Avilés, Mexico)
LE FILM FRAN?AIS PRIZE
“La Camarista”
LATIN AMERICAN VISION PRIZES
HABANERO PRIZE
“Miriam miente,” (Natalia Cabral, Oriol Estrada, Dominican Republic, Spain)
SOFIA FILMS PRIZE
“We’re All Sailors,” (Miguel Angel Moulet, Peru)
NMF Y COLOR FRONT
“Buenaventura, Mon Amour (Somos calentura)” (Jorge Navas, Colombia, Argentina)
HD ARGENTINA PRIZE
“Buenaventura, Mon Amour (Somos calentura)” (Jorge Navas, Colombia, Argentina)
LAMAYOR CINEMA PRIZE
“We’re All Sailors,” (Miguel Angel Moulet, Peru)
KALIU CINEMA DIFFUSION PRIZES
“El despertar de las hormigas,” (Antonella Sudasassi, Costa Rica)
Related stories
Ventana Sur: Blood Window Shows Maturation with Double Winner 'The Muglur'
Ventana Sur: Blood Window Opens for Finnish Project 'Manslaughter in Buenos Aires'
Ventana Sur: Storyboard Announces Their Most Ambitious Production Yet, 'Jailbreak Pact' (EXCLUSIVE)
Subscribe to Variety Newsletters and Email Alerts!
Solve the daily Crossword
