Written and Edited by Nadine C and Alka Gunjal;
Photos by Erik H
The Havana Film Festival New York (HFFNY) joined hands with Havana’s International Festival of New Latin American Cinema to make audiences familiar with renowned filmmakers. The festival offers a multicultural experience for the audience gathered from diverse regions.
HFFNY showed the latest nominated films from Latin America and the Caribbean community. This event provides an opportunities for producers, actors and directors to share their creative ideas and promote the vision of Latino culture. As in the past, the 14th HFFNY encouraged artist-audience dialogue via panel discussions created to offer a behind the scenes view of an industry which has achieved significant worldwide recognition. Every year, the list of selected films represents the strong social and cultural identities embedded in every country and city of Latin America.
This year’s festival, the 14th HFFNY, featured over 40 films from the United States, Puerto Rico, Peru, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, Cuba, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia. HFFNY took place from the 12th to 19th of April 2013 and it successfully upheld the status for which it is known for – expanding and enriching the vision of Latino culture at a global level. The New York audience was fortunate to view many award-winning documentaries, feature films, classics, animation and shorts along with few independent films which were not yet screened in the U.S.
Attended by more than 1,000 foreign participants, HFFNY brought together highly eminent personalities from different corners of the world. The audience had an opportunity to enjoy theoretical workshops, concerts, visual arts exhibits and book launching events with their favorite filmmakers. Film lovers deeply enjoyed the screening of horror and fiction films from regions like Poland, Italy, Germany, Canada and Spain along with highly avant-garde cinema of Latin America.
Access to films and panels were at Quad Cinema, Director’s Guild Theater, the Museum of Moving Images, NYU’s Casa Italiana, the Bronx Museum, and Instituto Cervantes.
Some of my favorite events included the screening of 7 Cajas and Luciano Castillo’s Chronology of Cuban Cinema (1897-1930) and (1937-1944) book launch and lecture.