The premiere in Cuba of Brazilian feature film O Filme da Minha Vida (The Movie of My Life), by Selton Mello, is marking the opening of the 39th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema.
The opening gala of the event took place at the Karl Marx Theater in Havana, starting with a concert by Camerata Romeu chamber orchestra and Cuban pianist Alejandro Falcon.
The Coral Prize of Honor was given to Carlos Diegues, one of the representative figures of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, who in turn is one of the producers of O Filme da Minha Vida, a work based on the book Un Padre de Pelicula (A Father of Film), by Chilean Antonio Skarmeta.
The cast of the feature film – set in southern Brazil in the 1960s – is comprised of actors Johnny Massaro (Tony Terranova), Vincent Cassel (Nicolas Terranova), Bruna Linzmeyer (Luna Madeira), Martha Nowill (Carmelia) and Mello (Paco).
The 39th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema will exhibit in Havana about 404 films until December 17.
According to the director of the Festival, Ivan Giroud, about 19 fiction feature films, 18 premier, 23 documentaries, 18 shorts and medium-length films, 16 animated films, 20 unpublished scripts and 24 posters will compete this year for the Coral Prize.
The 39th edition of the event is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Universidad del Cine, an academic institution in Argentina that has formed personalities of the Seventh Art, and in honor of the centenary of the October Revolution, it will exhibit the 1927 film entitled Oktyabr (October), by Sergei Eisenstein.
The event will also pay tribute to North American film director, James Ivory, who is traveling to Havana to present nine of his own fiction films, two of them with screenplays by Japanese novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Noble Prize in Literature this year.
Prensa Latina