From 10 to 21 August, Palace Electric is hosting this year’s Cine Latino Film Festival – a new and diverse festival of Latin American cinema.
The most popular entry at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and opening the Cine Latino Film Festival, is the audacious and engaging new film Neruda.
Set three years after World War II, Chile remains in a state of peril as a fascist government labels famous poet and Senator Pablo Neruda (Alfredo Castro) a ‘communist enemy’ of the land.
As Neruda flees to different corners of Chile searching for hiding, an extensive police hunt is led by Oscar Peluchoneau (Gael Garcia Bernal).
The film continually plays with artificiality and instances of abrupt realism, serving as a timely reminder that the Communist Party’s struggles in Chile had real sense for the mistreated working class and credits artists such as Neruda and Picasso as leaders for the socialist rise.
The story is similar to last years The Revenant, in which one man is searching his enemy for largely the whole film, creating a bond between the two from a small distance of land.
Director Pablo Larrain does a wonderful job at capturing the Latin American culture — the shots of the Chilean highlands are simply breathtaking. Bernal as Policeman Peluchoneau steals the show, as he attempts to wrestle with the temptation of falling in love with Neruda’s poetry and statesmanship.
Neruda however, is at times a strange film that tonally can be a little hard to pin down. Through its reams of prose-like narration, it can be simultaneously enticing and distancing, sketching a picture of an iconic cultural hero while at the same time rendering him almost unknowable. The relationships though, are riveting, with the film driven mostly by this invisible connection between Neruda and Peluchoneau.
Throughout the Cine Latino Film Festival there are also several films from many different Latin American countries that seem to broach the complexities, humour and eroticism of modern love that Neruda creates. Films such as Fragments of Love; an erogenous drama set in Puerto Rico. Argentina’s two films: The Violin Teacher, follows the story of a former prodigal child violinist as its centerpiece which includes a stunning musical performance, and (closing the festival) Argentina; a documentary which shows us the past, present and future of Argentina’s rich folk music and dance heritage.
The full list of films can be found on their website www.cinelatinofilmfestival.com.au. If you’re looking for a perfect night away from the Canberra winter, the Cine Latino Film Festival is waiting for you!
