Our annual festival of Spanish and Latin American cinema, has been expanded this year to provide a broader picture of the range of work being produced in the Spanish-speaking world. The festival is mounted in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes in Dublin, and it originated at The Cornerhouse in Manchester, in the hands of their tireless programmer Linda Pariser. This year’s bigger event includes more Latin American films that in previous years, reflecting the growing importance of work from countries such as Argentina, Mexico and Chile. Our opening film, Francisco Vargas’s The Violin/El violín, was one of the surprise discoveries at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Beautifully shot in black and white, it’s a surprisingly successful mixture of music and politics, in which the remarkable Don Ángel Tavira plays an ageing and seemingly harmless musician who turns out to be involved in the Mexican peasant guerrilla movement of the 1970s. Other highlights from Latin America include The Aura/El aura, a mature and sophisticated thriller from Nine Queens director Fabián Bielinsky, who died last year; Pablo Trapero’s Born and Bred/Nacido y criado; and Carlos Sorín’s The Road to San Diego/El camino de San Diego, a delightfully offbeat follow-up to Bombón el perro. From Spain, there are major new films from Alex de la Iglesia (Ferpect Crime/Crimen ferpecto), Agustín Díaz Yanes (the historical epic Alatriste, our closing film) and Carlos Iglesias (Crossing Borders/Un franco, 14 pesetas). The discovery from Spain this year is Jorge Sánchez-Caberzudo’s superb thriller The Night of the Sunflowers/La noche de los girasoles.
Plenty to enjoy, then, and those who are up for a challenge might care to check out Albert Serra’s take on Don Quixote, Honour of the Knights/Honor de cavallería or the rarely seen Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s visually striking and totally unhinged follow-up to his classic El Topo.
As well as screening in Dublin, festival highlights will tour onto Galway and Cork.
