Competing at the French event were Colombian features Don Ca and La Gorgona, historias fugadas and short films Flores and Solecito
The Biarritz Latin American Film Festival winds up its 22nd edition as one of Europe’s leading Latin American film events. Every year, the Unión Latina sponsors feature, short and documentary film competitions along with a variety of tributes and retrospectives. The festival also aims to showcase Latin American culture in its many forms through photography expositions, film and literature conferences, and university encounters.
This year, four Colombian films took part in the event. Patricia Ayala’s feature, Don Ca, in the Documentary Competition, is the portrait of a richly complex character who, having inherited the best and the worst of Colombian society, decides to make of his life a libertarian manifesto defining happiness as “striving to possess little in order to have it all”. But the world is cruel and paradise is often lost. Nearly 40 years after choosing his surprising path in life, Don Ca wonders if the time has come to give up his world.
This documentary arrived in Biarritz after competing in the Feature Documentary category at the 2013 Vision du Réel International Festival in Switzerland, which opened the door to the “Doc Corner” in the Marché du Film at the 2013 Cannes Festival; at EDOC’s “Encounters with the Other” in Ecuador; in the Latin American Competition at the FIDOCS International Documentary Festival in Chile; and at the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, to name only a few.
Also present in Biarritz was Camilo Botero’s La Gorgona, historias fugadas. A man flees the police and a convict in charge of his surveillance. A prisoner harvests oranges, another sells coconuts on the sly. A birthday in solitary confinement and a lifeless body that washes up on the beach. One inmate shines shoes while another secretly distills moonshine. Several attempts but only one escape. Dozens of sharks but only a single bite. Twenty-five years on the prison island of Gorgona.
Before arriving in Biarritz, the film attended the SANFIC9 Film Festival in Santiago, where the previous year it won Best Film in the Latin American Work in Progress event; the Colombian Film Festival in Medellín; the Barichara International Film Festival; the 2012 International New Latin American Cinema Festival in Havana, Cuba, where it won the ALBA Nuestra América Primera Copia Post-Production Award; and the Rewrite Workshop and Documentary Pitch event sponsored by Doc Buenos Aires/Latin Side of the Doc at the 2010 Cartagena International Film Festival (FICCI).
Competing in the Short Film category were Marcela Gómez Montoya’s Flores, which also screened at the Guanajuato International Film Festival (GIFF), the Cartagena International Film Festival (FICCI), and the Barichara International Film Festival, and Oscar Ruiz Navia’s Solecito, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2013 Cannes Festival and was recently awarded the ABD-SP Prize at the Sao Paolo International Latin American Short Film Festival.
