Thursday 29 October 2009

Peruvian Cinema (in the age of transnational film finance)


Image of Fausta/Magaly Solier, in La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow (Claudia Llosa, Spain/Peru, 2009) - see a review of this film here


Film Studies For Free's author attended a very stimulating seminar yesterday given by Sarah Barrow of Anglia Ruskin University, entitled 'Transnational Film Financing in the Hispanic World: A Peruvian Case Study'.

Barrow presented a fascinating overview of Peruvian cinema in the last five years, and, in particular, of the efforts made by an emerging set of filmmakers to take advantage of new international funding and support opportunities. These include the regional Ibermedia programme, Rotterdam Film Festival’s Hubert Bals project, the Berlin World Cinema Fund (WCF), and the Cannes screenwriting residency awards for developing writer-director talent from developing economies. Barrow focused on the career trajectories of two Peruvian writer-directors: Josué Méndez (Días de Santiago [2004]; Dioses [2008]) and Claudia Llosa (Madeinusa [2006]; La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow [2009], Winner of the Golden Bear Award at the Berlinale 2009 and 2009 Foreign-Language Oscar Nominee).

FSFF wanted to follow up on Barrow's valuable seminar with some online resources for researchers working on Peruvian cinema as well as on transnational film finance. Below, then, are some links to high-quality, openly-accessible, scholarly work on these topics, most of them in English. See also FSFF's earlier post on Studies of 'Third Cinema' and anti-Eurocentric film culture


4 comments:

Michael Chanan said...

Libia Villazana has just published 'Transnational Financial Structures in the Cinema of Latin America: Programa Ibermedia in Study"
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Transnational-Financial-Structures-Cinema-America/dp/3639161866/ref=pd_ys_wizard_1

Catherine Grant said...

Thanks Michael. I spotted this book when I searched for the Open Access and Google books previews listed above. It looks excellent. I thought I'd also mention Libia Villazana's 46-minute documentary Latin America in Co-production (Villazana, UK/Peru 2007), which explores the mechanisms, pros and cons of the practice of Latin American co-production with European finance. Another non-Open Access but truly excellent resource. But I did just discover the following openly accessible, partly anglophone, partly Spanish-language, audio resource (the link to which I will also add above) to a related recording of a panel discussion involving Villazana entitled Film Synergies at the Tate Modern as part of the Latin American Film Festival about the documentary and co-production practices generally (25-11-2007). Click on the following: http://bit.ly/3XLSqz (MPEG Layer 2 Audio, 85.5 MB). Thanks again for your comment.

HarryTuttle said...

Yvette Biró, "A song of Growing Up Delivered from Fear" (at Unspoken Cinema)

Catherine Grant said...

Thanks a lot, Harry. That's a really nice review of the film.