CubaPLUS Magazine

The premiere in Cuba of the Brazilian feature film O Filme da minha vida (The movie of my life), by Selton Mello, marked the opening of the 39th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema. The inaugural gala of the event held at the Havanan Teatro Karl Marx began with a concert shared by Camerata Romeu and Cuban pianist Alejandro Falcón. In this ceremony, the Coral de Honor was presented to one of the representative figures of the Brazilian Cinema Novo, Carlos Diegues, who in turn is one of the producers of La película de mi vida, a work based on the book A Father of cinema, by the Chilean Antonio Skármeta. They integrate the cast of the feature film - set in southern Brazil in the 1960s - the actors Johnny Massaro (Tony Terranova), Vincent Cassel (Nicolas Terranova), Bruna Linzmeyer (Luna Madeira), Martha Nowill (Carmelia) and the own Mello (Paco). The 39th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema will exhibit in Havana 404 films until December 17th. Of the total, 308 belong to Latin American countries, led by Argentina (65), Mexico (50), Cuba (43), Brazil (41), Chile (32) and Colombia (21). The rest of the audiovisuals come from other parts of the world, from nations such as the United States, Spain, France, Germany and Great Britain. According to the director of the Festival, Ivan Giroud, this year will compete for the Coral Prize 19 fiction feature films, 18 raw operas, 23 documentaries, 18 shorts and medium-length films, 16 animated films, 20 unpublished scripts and 24 posters. In addition, in this edition is expected the delivery of several collateral awards such as Glauber Rocha, sponsored by the Latin American News Agency Prensa Latina. The 39th edition of the event will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Universidad del Cine, an Argentine academic institution that has formed bastions of the seventh art, and in tribute to the centenary of the October Revolution will exhibit the 1927 film entitled Oktyabr (October), by Sergei Eisenstein . Also, the event will pay homage to the American film director James Ivory, who will travel to Havana to present nine fiction films, two of them with scripts in which the hand of the Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.