by the El Reportero’s news services
Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro announced the creation of the International Animation Center in the city of Guadalajara, in order to take advantage of the existing talent in the country.
During a conference at the 34th edition of the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG), he said on Suday that ‘this is a unique moment, we are breaking the model in animation.’
The film director commented that the goal is to work with series and feature films, with local talent ‘because we are looking for the next generation of filmmakers’.
We will try to convert it, he added, into a model that allows international production to give us a workshop to learn and then work on the projects, but that way there will be a connection between Guadalajara and the world.
Through this project, he considered, it will be possible to find great stories and believe in those stories; for that, the International Animation Center will play an important role.
The Guadalajara International Film Festival, which will conclude on the 15th, is considered the most solid meeting of its kind in Latin America, and its headquarters is the Telmex Auditorium where it paid tribute to the actress Blanca Guerra, who was awarded the Mayahuel de Plata prize and her film Day of the Dead by director Carlos Gutiérrez Medrano was screened.
Guerra remembered his passage through the various performing arts, especially in film alongside directors such as Arturo Ripstein, Carlos Carrera and María Novaro, among others. He also made an urgent call to support the production of Mexican cinema and seek to increase it.
The 34th edition of the Festival will exhibit 295 fiction films and documentaries from around the world. It will have 428 screenings in 30 commercial theaters and 113 films in the official section that will compete for the Mezcal Award for the best Mexican productions, and the Mayahuel Award for Ibero-American fiction and documentary productions.
Argentine documentary wins Grand Prize Santiago Álvarez
Troperos, the first documentary by Argentine Nicolas Detry, won the Santiago Alvarez Grand Prize at the 17th Santiago Álvarez in Memoriam International Festival of Documentary Films that ended Tuesday with the participation of 16 works from 11 countries.
The first three awards went to Strike a Pose, by Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan from Holland-Belgium; Fanon Yesterday, Today by Hassane Mezine from France-Algeria, and Side B, also opera prima by Ricardo Yebra from Spain, respectively.
The jury, headed by renowned filmmaker Jorge Fuentes, recognized as best opera prima Fire Mouth by Luciano Pérez Fernández from Brazil, and as a project Benny More’s Last Days by Cuban Damian Pérez Téllez while in the direction and photography also awarded Detry.
There were also awarded in screenplay Fanon Yesterday, Today; in soundtrack and editing Strike a Pose, while the International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños did it with the documentary series Adolescence, Damocles’ Sword from the Cuban telecentre Tunas Vision.
During the last day of the event, which celebrated the centenary of Santiago Alvarez and 60 years of Cuban cinema in Revolution, it was announced that the coming event will be dedicated to Canada and will commit again for the validity of a cinematographic genre renewed with the times and technologies.
The theoretical seminar of this edition had significant solidarity moments with Venezuela in response to the imperial onslaught and added voices to the need to show with solid arguments, in images and sounds, the resistance of that people in defense of the conquests of the Bolivarian Revolution.
Artificer of the ICAIC News, declared World Memory by UNESCO, Santiago Álvarez left in 1998 when he died a vast trajectory that made him transcend in the Latin American and world cinema with documentaries that renewed the genre and reflected palpitating realities of the world.
