The program of Iberian-American films in Tuškanac consists of a few much-touted active-yet-invisible filmmakers from the author margins, as well as struggling cinema traditions such as the Chilean and Peruvian that were completely anonymous even among the international film festival cognoscenti until recently…



During my trip to Rio in 1989, I sipped freshly squeezed juice made of tropical fruits on the terrace of the café bar Garota de Ipanema, a beautiful garota wearing thongs approached me and put a flyer in my hand that in huge black letters read “Vote for Lulu”. It took quite a bit of time after that for this eager leader of the Working party to become the first leftist Brazilian president and to put an end to the painfully long period in which shaky so-called democratic regimes took turns with military juntas, even though Lulu himself was not immune to pragmatic pranks. Subsequent to the rise of the unyielding Lulu, who a few weeks earlier had said that it was a great injustice that South America had to pay for the sins of the greedy Wall Street casino economy, Brazil’s turn to the left was followed by some of its neighbors. Inevitably this had significant consequences on their sleepy cinema, such as Brazil’s Cinema Novo in which Barret’s Dona Flor has now been replaced by Waddington’s Darlene and so forth. Positive proof of this is to be found in the selection of Iberian-American films in Tuškanac consisting of a few much-touted active-yet-invisible filmmakers from the author margins, as well as struggling cinema traditions such as the Chilean and Peruvian that were completely anonymous even among the international film festival cognoscenti until recently. This does not include Argentinean cinema, the third generation of which (Martel, Alonso, Fenderik, Pineiro) has a somewhat better status, having already experienced a sudden takeoff in the 1990s, a phenomenon which is easily explained by the blossoming of film schools during that period.

A stronger step toward the Chilean film festival scene came about with Anders Wood’s Macha, which dissects social class differences through a story about the friendship of two boys belonging to different social groups. However, it is a good example of a smart mainstream crowd-pleasing film. This year the Cannes program Quinzaine included the much more radical Tony Manero by the avid nihilist Pablo Larrain who shows the horrors of dictator Pinochet’s bloody night fever through a story about an impersonator of Travolta’s legendary character Manero. At that time, the darkest days of Chilean history coincided with the most glittering days of mainstream disco.

We find similar socially engaged topics in Jorge Lombardi’s In the Mouth of the Wolf whose story takes place at the time of the Peruvian civil war and the Sandero Luminoso guerrilla movement (a similar motif was used by the more well-known John Malkovich’s film The Dancer Upstairs, available on DVD), and also in Con Game by the Peruvian director Alberto 'Chicho' Durant, about the adventures of a Spanish crook who is active in Peru in the dusk of Fujimori’s perverted regime during which everybody owed something to somebody.

The Iberian segment of this program also makes use of human rights topics, even though it resists following the moralizing strategy of a politically correct pamphlet. The topics in these films range from the terror of advertising in the era of aggressive neo-liberalism (Dot.Com) to issues of illegal immigrants for which the authors of the audaciously comprehensive documentary Balseros had to travel all the way to Cuba in order to immerse themselves in the tragic destinies of its illegal “paddlers” who, instead of reaching the promised land of Florida, ended up in Guantanamo after Clinton and Castro signed a treaty to stop the Cuban refugee wave threatening American shores. Spanish director Fernando Leon de Aranoa (Mondays in the Sun) emulates the social trajectory of Ken Loach at a time when the destiny of Spanish shipyards almost coincides with the agony of Croatia’s, and returns to the forgotten character of a pauperized proletarian who falls into the disfavor of the movie as if he were a leper, when he is used only by rare filmmakers such as Glawogger (Workingman's Death), Zhangke (24 City) and Calopresti (La fabbrica dei Tedeschi). (Dragan Rubeša)