Festival spotlights Latin film in a charged political climate
Festival spotlights Latin film in a charged political climate
San Francisco has changed in the years since Lucho Ramirez founded Cine+Mas San Francisco Latino Film Festival.
“For me, it’s important that a top city like San Francisco continues having a festival that celebrates Latin American film,” festival Director Ramirez, 46, says.
Ramirez, a Chicago native who has made his home in the Bay Area for 20 years and whose background is in marketing, media, advertising and events sales, was first a volunteer for it before he got involved with the sponsorship side of things.
“When it suddenly closed, I decided to work with the volunteers and board members that remained to go ahead and continue doing what we had been doing for years at that point,” he says.
Nineteen narrative features, six documentaries, plus shorts make up the 2015 schedule of works, which hail from Latin America, the United States and Europe.
Five films are by female directors, although Ramirez is not sure if that is the start of a trend of more representation by women or just the luck of this year’s draw.
[...] if Hollywood is dominated by films meant for the youth market, maturity holds center stage at this year’s festival.
The 2015 edition of the San Francisco Latino Film Festival opens Sept. 18 with a Mexican drama, Alejandro Gerber Bicecci’s “A Separate Wind,” in which a young teen and his preteen sister are stranded in a beach resort town.
Opening with “A Separate Wind” is not overtly political, but it does play to the current political landscape in the United States with a presidential candidate in Donald Trump, who has built his platform on antiimmigrant positions.
The mere existence of our film festival in many ways is that there is a lack of Latino imagery in media outside of maybe sensationalistic reporting or the more unsavory characters on TV or film.