We are proud to announce that five LPB funded films have been selected to screen at the 31st Havana International Film Festival (Festival Internacional de Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de la Habana). The selected films are: GRANITO: HOW TO NAIL A DICTATOR, PARAISO FOR SALE, PRECIOUS KNOWLEDGE, UNFINISHED SPACES and El VELADOR. The festival’s mission is to acknowledge and showcase films which contribute to the enrichment and reaffirmation of cultural identity in Latin America and the Caribbean. The festival will take place Thursday, December 1, 2011 to Sunday, December 11, 2011. For more information, please visit the festival website at: www.habanafilmfestival.com.
GRANITO: HOW TO NAIL A DICTATOR
Producer: Paco de Onis
Director: Pamela Yates
Documentary/103 Minutes
GRANITO: HOW TO NAIL A DICTATOR is a story of destinies joined by Guatemala’s past, and how a documentary film intertwined with a nation’s turbulent history emerges as an active player in the present. In GRANITO: HOW TO NAIL A DICTATOR our characters sift for clues buried in archives of mind and place and historical memory, seeking to uncover a narrative that could unlock the past and settle matters of life and death in the present. Each of the five main characters whose destinies collide in GRANITO: HOW TO NAIL A DICTATOR are connected by the Guatemala of 1982, then engulfed in a war where a genocidal “scorched earth” campaign by the military exterminated nearly 200,000 Maya people. Now, as if a watchful Maya god were weaving back together threads of a story unraveled by the passage of time, forgotten by most, our characters become integral to the overarching narrative of wrongs done and justice sought that they have pieced together, each adding their granito, their tiny grain of sand, to the epic tale.
GRANITO: HOW TO NAIL A DICTATOR is a co-production of Skylight Pictures, Inc. and Independent Television Service (ITVS), produced in association with Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB), with funding provided by Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). For more information about the film, please visit the filmmaker’s website at: www.skylightpictures.com.
For more information about the film, please visit the filmmaker’s website at: www.skylightpictures.com/films/granito.
PARAISO FOR SALE
Director: Anayansi Prado
Documentary/73 Minutes
What price would you pay for paradise? And who would you be willing to take it from? Panama is one of the most sought after real estate destinations in the world. The archipelago of Bocas del Toro, a gem hidden away in the Caribbean side of Panama, attracts retirees and developers from the US with its crystal clear waters and luscious trees.
Filmmaker, Anayansi Prado, returns to her homeland to document the effects the fast-growing migration of American retirees and developers to Bocas del Toro is having on the local community. PARAISO FOR SALE explores issues of modern day colonialism, residential tourism and global gentrification and reveals that migration between Latin America and the US is not just a one-way street.
For more information about the film, please visit the filmmaker’s website at: www.paraisoforsale.weebly.com.
PRECIOUS KNOWLEDGE
Director: Ari Luis Palos
Producer: Eren Isabel McGinnis
Documentary/90 Minutes
PRECIOUS KNOWLEDGE interweaves the transformative stories of students in the Mexican American Studies Program at Tucson High School. The program has become a model of educational success with 100% of their students graduating from high school and 82% attending college. We filmed their social justice throughout an entire school year to document disenfranchised youth becoming engaged, informed and active Chicanos. However, Arizona lawmakers believe the students are being indoctrinated with dangerous ideology and that the classes teach anti-American, anti-capitalist destructive ethnic chauvinism.
PRECIOUS KNOWLEDGE is a co-production of Dos Vatos Productions and the Independent Television Service (ITVS), produced in association withLatino Public Broadcasting (LPB) and Arizona Public Media, with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
For more information about the film, please visit the filmmaker’s website at: www.dosvatos.com/InProduction.
UNFINISHED SPACES
Producers: Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray
Documentary/84 min
In 1961, in the heady first days of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro asked three visionary architects to build the Cuban National Arts Schools on what had been the golf course of a country club. Before they construction was completed, the Revolution became Sovietized, and suddenly the project was denounced as bourgeoise and counter-revolutionary. The story has many more fascinating twists and turns, as these radical, magnificent buildings become a prism through which we see the turbulent, ever-shifting history of Castro’s Cuba and follow the fates of the three architects, now in their 80s, who would get a second chance to revitalize their utopian project.
For more information about the film, please visit the filmmaker’s website at: www.ajnafilm.com.
EL VELADOR
Director: Natalia Almada
Documentary/72 Minutes
Director Natalia Almada follows Martin, the night watchman of one of the most ornate cemeteries in northern Mexico, where drug lords and corrupt cops are laid to rest. A documentary spawned from violence, EL VELADORshows the end result of a chronic societal crisis. But Almada’s approach is poetic, not sociological, filled with striking surreal images of elaborate mausoleums that disrupt the pastoral landscape. As the cemetery, filled with widows tending to their husband’s shrines, constantly expands, the dreamlike quality of Almada’s filmmaking creates a disembodied atmosphere where the poor and living labor day and night for the rich deceased.
For more information about the film, please visit the filmmaker’s website at: www.altamurafilms.com/el_velador.html.
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