ANYONE who thinks they can cover all the options provided by the 35th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema will be making a crass error. It is genuinely impossible to attend the screening of more than 300 movies, without even considering attending the accompanying seminars, expositions, talks and encounters.

The organizers themselves, as the Festival’s new president, Ivan Giroud, explained in an advance press conference, are counting on a selection committee. The reason is simple. As he said, this year they received the incredible number of 2,400 registration requests.

After passing through this sieve, the Festival is still offering an extensive and inclusive panorama of cinema from all parts of the world during the event, scheduled December 5-15.

Giroud, who directed the Festival for some years, has replaced as president Alfredo Guevara, who died earlier this year. Precisely for that reason, Giroud began by recalling the man who was also one of the founders of the New Latin American Cinema Festival.

"This 35th Festival is special," he commented. "It is being done without Alfredo and it has been one of the hardest tasks to think about it without him, but he will be in every event and at every showing.

Alfredo is going to be moving through the Festival, he cannot be separated from it," and he quoted, by means of an example, "In the restoration, with French help, of six programs of the Noticiero Latinoamericano, which he perceived as Latin American and afterward passed on to the director Santiago Alvarez;" or in the section Diez filmes para salvar (1O Films to Save), those which he considered essential: Dios y el diablo en la tierra del sol, Glauber Rocha; Strawberry and Chocolate, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea – Juan Carlos Tabio; Modern Times, Charles Chapin; A bout de souffle, Jean-Luc Godard; Providence, Alain Resnais; La strada, Federico Fellini; Umberto D, Vittorio de Sica: Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti; Los olvidades, (The Young and the Damned), Luis Buñuel; and Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein.
Entering fully into the competition for the Coral Prizes, Giroud noted that 21 full length fiction films were selected (titles such as Wakolda, by Argentine Lucia Puenzo; Memórias cruzadas, by Brazilian Lucia Murat; or Heli, by Mexican Amat Escalante, awarded Best Direction prize in the Cannes Festival A Certain Regard section.

These are followed by 22 medium length and short fiction films, 21 First Works (including the much appreciated La jaula de oro, by Mexican Diego Quemada, as its young amateur actors won the prize for best interpretation in the A Certain Regard section); 30 documentaries; 31 animated films; and 25 unpublished scripts.

For this Festival, Cuba has included two films. Bocccaccerías habaneras, with script and direction by Arturo Sotto and produced by the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), which includes actors Daniel Amat, Félix Beatón, Mario Guerra and Claudia Álvarez, with special performances by Jorge Perugorría, Cucú Diamante and the Habana Compás Dance group.

Its synopsis: three independent stories linked by a central thread: the room of a writer in an imaginative crisis, where people show up to tell stories in the hope that they will become themes or characters in his novels. A version of the Boccaccio in an urban environment, a Havana Decameron; a film full of sensuality, self-possession, irreverence and hidden passions.

Other films of De Sotto are the 1992 fiction short Talco para lo Negro (Coral prize in the 14th Havana Film Festival), and the full length movies Pon tu pensamiento en mí (1995); Amor Vertical (1997); and La noche de los inocentes, 2007 (Special Jury Prize, Biarritz Festival, France.

The other Cuban film in competition is Jirafas, directed by Enrique Alvarez with script by Claudia Muñiz. An independent production (KA Producciones, Producciones Largasluces, Galaxia 311, Open Roads Media and the collaboration of the San Antonio de los Baños Film School EICTV).

The synopsis begins by announcing an eccentric story of cohabitation. The film was included this year in the official section of the Rotterdam Film Festival and won the Spirit Award Fiction Prize in the Brooklyn Film Festival 2013.

Álvarez has two full length fiction films behind him: La ola (1994) and Marina (2011).

Outside of the competition are films from maestros of New Latin American Cinema such as Metegol, by Argentine Juan José Campanella; Insurgentes, by Bolivian Jorge Sanjinés; and Flores raras, by Brazilian Bruno Barreto.

Giroud also explained that some sections have surpassed their conceptions and new ones have been created, with different objectives and with the premise of offering a better variety for all tastes.
Thus in Latin America in Perspective there are sub-sections as attractive as A media noche (for the growing taste in horror movies in Latin America ); A sala llena (popular taste); Historias de violencia (genre or others); or La memoria ("because Latin American cinema has a profound vocation for conserving memory").

Other Latitudes includes a German cinema series (the director Margarethe von Trotta returns with Hannah Arendt); British (the ever-present Ken Loach, this time with The Angels’ Share); Spanish (many known, like Ventura Pons’ Ignasi M; Pedro Almodóvar with Los amantes pasajeros; Fernando Trueba, with El artista y la modelo; or Gracia Querejeta and the film 15 años y un día), plus movies from Poland, Canada, Czech Republic and South Korea.

The always awaited International Panorama includes a film by the outstanding Chinese director Zhang Yimou, Love under the Hawthorn Tree; and from the French director François Ozon, In the House; plus others from Canada, Denmark, Japan, Nigeria, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Seven Special Presentations are planned, including The Invisible World (various directors, including Atom Egoyan, Manoel de Oliveira, Maria de Medieros, Theo Angelopoulos and Win Wenders) and Untold History of the United States, a series in 12 chapters directed by Oliver Stone.

It has already been announced that the opening ceremony is to screen the Chilean film directed by Sebastián Lelio, Gloria, with Paulina García, who won the Silver Bear for best female role at the Berlin International Film Festival.