Archive for the ‘South America Industry News’ Category

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6852KM20100906

By R.T. Watson

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - It was the middle of the night in Jardim Tiradentes, one of Sao Paulo’s rougher neighborhoods. A two-man crew was waiting to film a police raid when chief inspector Rafael Correa Lodi broke the bad news.

“If there’s a risk of them killing the girl, there’s also a risk they will fire at us — so you guys have to stay here.”

He was addressing director Jorge Atalla and his cameraman, who had been following the inspector’s anti-kidnapping team for close to a year for the upcoming documentary “Sequestro.” Now, just as the cops were about to storm a shabby building where a 6-year-old girl was believed to be held, Atalla was forced to withdraw.

If some had their way Atalla might cease making his film altogether.

With Brazil’s film industry in the midst of a major resurgence, local filmmakers, intent on chronicling the country’s character in unflinching fashion, find themselves at odds with a strategy to improve the global perception that Brazil is a crime-ridden land with little to offer the international film community.

Regardless of image concerns, within the local film sector plenty has changed and optimism is running at an all-time high. Box office revenues rose 33% in 2009, while the market share for indigenous releases was up 43% to 14.2%, according to Pedro Buchter, editor of preeminent local film trade Filme B.

Ticket grosses are up 20% through July and the film sector is expected to crack the R$1 billion ($568 million) mark for the first time by year’s end.

“It’s Brazil’s time,” says Sergio Leitao, CEO of Riofilme, a municipally funded organization that fuels film production in Rio. “We have to live up to the challenge.”

Brazil is doing just that.

Massive initiatives, both private and state-sponsored, plan to add several hundred more screens to the market in the next few years. In the private sector Mexican exhibitor Cinepolis, new to the territory, is investing $284 million into unveiling 290 new screens in the next two years, while the government’s Cinema Near You program will extend low-interest credit lines to national exhibitors who build in small towns or highly populated urban areas that lack theaters.

Besides the expected growth in exhibition, well-funded new film schools and state-of-the-art studio facilities, government-sponsored groups like Cinema do Brasil and Riofilme are actively championing Brazil as a welcoming place to make movies.

Consider:

The city of Paulinia, a small oil-rich municipality near Sao Paulo, just spent more than $60 million on Polo Cinematografico de Paulinia, an expansive studio lot with state-of-the-art 3D animation stations and more than 5 million square feet of land reserved for sets.

Leitao’s Riofilme is negotiating with Summit Entertainment to shoot part of the final “Twilight” installment in the Rio area and has reportedly offered to cover 50% of production costs that “Twilight” would accrue there. Instead of coming from Riofilme’s budget, the city of Rio would invest a portion of its marketing budget into the production.

Riofilme is also working with Conspiricao Filmes on landing a Woody Allen production in Rio. After a visit to Rio’s emerald shores late last year by Allen’s agent, Steve Tenenbaum, and his producer, Letty Aronson, Mayor Eduardo Paes promised he’d raise whatever capital is required from private investors, if Allen commits. Riofilme also pledged $1 million toward the project, hoping Allen will conjure urban splendor similar to 2008’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”

In addition to Paulinia and other sophisticated studios like Estudios Quanta, also Brazil’s largest rental house, the country boasts versatile locales, agreeable weather and a thriving TV industry, meaning facilities and manpower are already in place. And while Brazil’s currency has been strengthening — at almost 1.8 Brazilian Reais to the dollar, compared with 2.6 in 2008 — the rate of exchange is still appealing to international producers.

“With such a huge television industry, there are qualified crews everywhere,” says producer Eduardo Levy, who recently started the Brazilian Film Network in Los Angeles to aid production companies considering a Brazil shoot. “Your average working week in Brazil is six days and you don’t have to pay as much in overtime, pensions or health. The cost of personnel is much lower (than in other parts of the world).”

Against all this, however, comes the negative image of Brazil — and Rio in particular — as a center of violence, that films like Atalla’s have unfortunately perpetuated.

Daniel Filho’s biopic “Chico Xavier” has taken in more than $17 million at the local box office this year.

“People think of Brazil in terms of corruption and only our bad side, and I am also a bit responsible for that,” concedes director Fernando Meirelles, whose “City of God” (2002) both dazzled audiences worldwide while reinforcing stereotypes about the slums (or “favelas”) surrounding Rio de Janiero.

In the eight years since “City of God,” little has changed in the way Brazil is viewed around the globe.

“The negative (has not been) contextualized with the positive or anything in between, thus leaving the spectrum incomplete,” producer Joshua Skurla says.

Many local filmmakers remain intent on creating portraits of Brazilian life that are as vivid as they are genuine, irrespective of the role they play in forming perceptions abroad — as with Atalla’s “Sequestro” and Jose Padilha’s upcoming police actioner, “Elite Squad 2,” the follow-up to the brutally violent original from 2007.

With “Squad 2″ about to receive the widest release of any Brazilian film in the past 20 years, thanks in larger part to Padilha’s own ambitions, he and his team are more interested in filling theater seats than rebranding Brazil’s image.

“I want my company and the investors of the film to make as much money as possible so I can make other films,” he says. “(But) every single movie that I have done has been about social commentary (which) I think can be entertaining. The more people that go to watch the movie the more debate I generate.”

One project that could positively impact the country’s image is Skurla’s “Rio, I Love You,” the latest installment in the Cities of Love franchise that includes 2006’s “Paris, I Love You” and 2009’s “New York, I Love You.”

With principal photography planned for first-half 2011, Leitao notes that “the idea is to attract films to Rio and promote Rio in a positive way. It would be like product placement.” Make no mistake, Leitao’s Riofilme sees international productions not only as opportunities to shift the paradigm but also a significant measure to boost foreign spending in the local sphere.

For Meirelles, who, like Padilha, has already signed on to direct one of the “Rio, I Love You” segments, changing negative stereotypes matters.

“After showing the hard part, it’s going to be good to show a good part of the city,” he says. “(’Rio, I Love You’) is going to be very positive, to compensate for ‘City of God.’”

Perhaps.

But back in Jardim Tiradentes, that’s the last thing on Atalla’s mind.

Shortly after he and his cameraman were forbidden to enter the building, they managed to recruit one of the officers to carry a small DV camera inside. Atalla had to sit out, but the footage proved invaluable, capturing the liberation of the young girl.

When Atalla saw the footage, he was thrilled. Now that the film is finished, however, his feelings are decidedly mixed.

“Most people I know who end up coming here for a couple of days wind up wanting to stay more, but (’Sequestro’) could have a negative effect, that’s for sure,” he admits. ” a documentary needs to show things we have not seen before and I was trying to show something that I had not seen. I never thought about whether it would frighten people from coming to (Brazil).”

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100414/ART/704139986/1082

Ed Stocker

For years Argentine film, like a struggling schoolchild, seemed to miss out on the top prize. Features poured out of Mexico and Brazil, where they were eagerly swallowed by European and American festival programmers who showered them with awards. Yet Argentina seemed destined to produce only a few art-house films a year, never penetrating the all-important international markets with the same success as some of its Latin American counterparts.

But the sands have rapidly shifted. Argentina is basking in Oscar success after El Secreto de sus Ojos, directed by Juan José Campanella, picked up the award for Best Foreign Language Film. (A cleverly intertwined murder investigation and love story, the plot flits between the present day and the 1970s military dictatorship.) It was the first time an Argentine film had won at the Oscars since Luis Puenzo’s La Historia Oficial 25 years earlier.

Campanella’s success is perhaps an exception to the rule. It’s not every day that non-English films get to piggyback the colossal publicity machine that is the Academy Awards. Nonetheless, away from the glitz and the glamour of Hollywood, Argentine cinema is enjoying an extraordinary period of growth. Thanks to a new generation of talented directors that have emerged in the past decade, such as Lucrecia Martel, Lisandro Alonso and Pablo Trapero, the country produces some 80 films a year. And the annual independent film festival, the Buenos Aires Festival International de Cine Indpendiente (BAFICI), is showing that successful international film festivals and thought-provoking, art-house cinema are by no means mutually exclusive.

This year’s festival – the 12th edition – is running at nine locations around the capital. Numbers have swelled to around a quarter of a million visitors, and there were 1,069 screenings in 2009. It might not be the most famous film festival in Latin America, but the programmer Fernando Chiappussi believes it’s one of the most significant.

“Generally, Latin American colleagues refer to us as the most important festival in the region, at least in terms of independent cinema,” he says. “There are other bigger or more glamorous festivals, like Mar del Plata, Rio de Janeiro or Guadalajara, but BAFICI is very well established and is a dearly loved festival that gets a lot of attention.”

The film jury is made up of directors and actors from Europe and the US, including Angela Bassett-Vance of Malcolm X and Boyz in the Hood fame, and the principal awards categories are for Best International Film and Best Argentine Work, the latter for both feature and short. On top of these principal categories, there are innovation awards for future cinema and human rights, as well as all the usual Special Jury, Best Director and Best Actor garlands. It’s a hugely varied line-up, with the international competition alone featuring 19 films from countries including the US, Spain, Mexico, Singapore, Italy and Romania.

Festival rules dictate that films that have already received extensive national and international attention aren’t a priority. Indeed, many of the features selected from overseas are Latin American premieres. What’s intriguing about BAFICI is the way it sticks to its “independent” roots, giving Argentine audiences the chance to watch foreign films that are a world away from the big-budget ones that normally fill cinemas. Of the three US films in the international competition this year, Putty Hill, directed by Matt Porterfield, tells the story of people struggling to come to terms with a friend’s death from a heroin overdose. Another, Go Get Some Rosemary (Daddy Longlegs), directed by Ben and Joshua Safdie, looks at a divorced father’s relationship with his two sons.

The programmers’ task of selecting films isn’t always easy. Argentina’s industry may be growing but it’s still reliant on financial support from international film funds, which can sometimes call into question how “independent” the films being shown really are.

“The most obvious criteria,” Chiappussi says, “is independence in terms of production. But as Argentina doesn’t have a really consolidated industry, almost all cinema is dependent on state subsidies and the support of overseas co-production funds. There are some films that are looking to move away from this system in which one often has to ‘present’ a project before making the film.”

Other imperatives, he adds, are that the films BAFICI showcases need to be art house as opposed to entertainment, and that the festival keeps pushing the envelope with works that mainstream channels might find too much of a risk to show.

For all the cutting-edge programming, Argentine films at the 2010 festival continue to address the years of military dictatorship, still a raw wound for many who lived through the worst period in the 1970s. The film that opened the festival on April 8, Secuestro y Muerte (Abduction and Death), directed by Rafael Filippelli, is a dramatisation of real events surrounding the capture and murder of the former junta leader General Aramburu. The closing film, meanwhile, Los Condenados (The Condemned), directed by the Spaniard Isaki Lacuesta, is set in present-day Argentina and centres around a group of former militants helping a forensic team find the body of an ex-partner. Other films, such as El Predio (The Building), showing in the Cine del Futuro category, is an avant-garde documentary about ESMA, a navy school in Buenos Aires used as one of the main torture centres during the dictatorship.

So why does Argentine cinema continue to tackle these issues from the past? “It’s an idea that’s still attractive due to its dramatic possibilities,” Chiappussi says. “And at the same time, it’s perceived as a burden because in the 1980s many films were made documenting the repression. Even now, Argentine cinema tends to be associated with this theme from abroad.”

While the success of La Historia Oficial set a precedent for this type of cinema, directors are finding new ways to tackle these sensitive topics with films like La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Headless Women) from Lucrecia Martel, which looks at ideas related to the dictatorship – such as the impunity of the upper classes and the pact of silence surrounding their actions – without explicitly referencing it.

“It’s like what happened with post-Nazi German cinema,” Chiappussi says. “Each new generation will find a different way of talking about the subject, and also the need to do it. These are traumatic episodes that both attract and repulse.”

Of course, there are Argentine films covering everything from political corruption to the aesthetic beauty of Buenos Aires at this year’s festival. And with two films in competition, Rodríguez and Somos Nosotros, from self-starters born in the 1980s, it might be time for even the new school to step aside for the latest crop of directorial talent.

With Buenos Aires Lab – a business network that looks to forge stronger links between film-producing Latin American countries – running alongside the festival, and a special arts fund from the city to help potential BAFICI directors, the state of Argentine cinema has never looked in such good health: bold, thought-provoking and, most importantly, independent.

The 2010 edition of BAFICI runs until Sunday. Visit www.bafici.gov.ar for more information.

http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v5/newsworld.php?id=483914

LIMA, March 20 (Bernama) — Peru seeks to promote the country as a destination for film shooting, the Commission on the Promotion of Peru for Export and Tourism (Promperu) announced, reports China’s Xinhua news agency.

The state-run company Promperu said in a statement that it will present Peru as an ideal destination for film production and advertisement at an international tourism fair, AFCI Locations Trade Show 2010, which will run from April 15 to 17 in Santa Monica, United States.

The event, organized by the Association of Film Commissioners International and integrated by professionals from the U.S. film industry, television and commercial video, is one of the most important fairs in the American film industry. It aims to find new venues for film shooting.

Some important audiovisual industry suppliers and film professionals will meet during the event to exchange information on new film-shooting locations, costs, resources and tax incentives. More than 3,500 professionals from 30 countries attended the fair last year.

– BERNAMA