The Toronto Hispano-American Film Festival, although titled as such, abandons any pretensions associated with film festivals to construct a program that is culturally and artistically relevant....

May 15^th - 25^th 2008

Wrote by: Rodrigo Toromoreno (Toronto Correspondent - Canada) 

When asked to form a list of Hispano-American filmmakers, one often invokes the names of the commercially celebrated Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Pedro Almodovar; if a film student were to take on the same task, Luis Buñuel's name would open and close that list. In any case, the exposure of Hispanic works and their directors extends as far as the imaginary borderlines of the country within which they are produced. Even if it were made into a North American remake, a Peruvian comedy would only be sold in Latin-American specialty shops to those who are curious about the exotic country previously known by European conquistadors as ‘The New World'. The situation, however, alters radically when one takes into account the rising number of Spanish-speaking immigrants that decide to establish their homes in the land of their northern neighbours because with this change of locations physical borders are eliminated, allowing a larger audience to form for these obscure films. From this point, film festivals arise as the ideal medium for exposing such neglected works and become the liminal zone between two otherwise distant worlds. 

The Toronto Hispano-American Film Festival, although titled as such, abandons any pretensions associated with film festivals to construct a program that is culturally and artistically relevant. A number of festivals with a latent ‘indie' fixation limit their selections to lesser-known works for the mere reason that these give their function an element of exclusivity. Conversely, ‘unknown' films featured at THAFF do not plan to remain branded by this status, as their goal is to attract rather than marginalize its audience. Organizers Daniel Irrazabal and Alejandro Pereira have successfully managed to balance forceful documentaries (see the review on Hacer Patria) and neo-screwball comedies (refer to Quién Dice Que es Facil?) in what turns out to be a festival as diverse as the audiences attending their screenings. With a Canadian short film based on Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum screened amongst the Colombian revenge production Bluff, the eclectic festival embraces various genres that are not necessarily emblematic of what people expect Spanish and Latin American cinema to be. Slums and revolutions have been traded for discussions of hybrid identities in most of the selections, and whenever social conflict is featured, such as the Salvadorian war in Sobreviviendo Guazapa (Surviving Guazapa), it is not treated as a platform for hyperbolic scenes of violence. It follows that the often-referenced term ‘Third Cinema'-a style of filmmaking through which Latin-American directors chose to represent their culture without resorting to Hollywood or art house techniques-is undergoing a revision within Canada's largest Spanish language film festival, if not throughout Spanish-speaking countries as a whole.

The pair of organizers have also used this eleventh instalment of the festival to display the work of Uruguayan painter Gerardo Gaudino. Employing iconic elements of the Southern Cone, his paintings highlight the beauty of the mundane by mixing earth tones with white in a vivid manner. The interesting inclusion art in the festival allows moviegoers to immerse in the culture of Hispano-America before the first reel of film begins to roll. Additionally, the award ceremony (refer to www.thaff.com for a complete list of winners) featured Spanish, Latin-American, and Canadian filmmakers as its jury in a palpable testament of THAFF's multi-national view of the film world. 

What can be said about the award-winning film festival in terms of its cultural effect is better experienced upon sitting down with the diverse audience members and listening to their comments on how they ‘never knew the horrible reality of the Argentine Dirty War'. It remains that the organizers are not simply providing viewers with a window into another culture, but unveiling a world imbedded within our current reality that is often veiled under the word "foreign".