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Few American filmmakers of the last 40 years await a major rediscovery like Hal Hartley, whose traces in modern movies are either too-minor or entirely unknown. Thus it’s cause for celebration that the Criterion Channel are soon launching a major retrospective: 13 features (which constitutes all but My America) and 17 shorts, a sui generis style and persistent vision running across 30 years. Expect your Halloween party to be aswim in Henry Fool costumes.

Speaking of: there’s a one-month headstart on seasonal programming with the 13-film “High School Horror”––most notable perhaps being a streaming premiere for the uncut version of Suspiria, plus the rare opportunity to see a Robert Rodriguez movie on the Criterion Channel––and a retrospective of Hong Kong vampire movies. A retrospective of ’70s car movies offer chills and thrills of a different sort

Six films by Allan Dwan and 12 “gaslight noirs” round out the main September series; The Eight Mountains,...

’Three Bullets’ by Génesis Valenzuela wins three prizes, with Gloria Carrión’s ’Pantasma’ also honoured.

The Dominican Republic director Génesis Valenzuela was the big winner at today’s (August 8) awards ceremony for Locarno’s talent development programme Open Doors.

The artist-filmmaker received three awards for her debut feature project Three Bullets (Tres Balas) described as “a visually enthralling journey intertwining colonial history, displacement and criminal investigation.”

The hybrid project employing narrative strategies from fiction, documentary and essay cinema investigates the murder of Dominican immigrant Lucrecia Pérez in Spain by four neo-Nazis in 1992. It is produced by Wendy B. Espinal.

Three...

Dominican project Tres balas (Three Bullets) has dominated the awards handed out by Open Doors, Locarno Pro’s talent development program for artists from underrepresented communities.

The pic, directed by Génesis Valenzuela and produced by Wendy Espinal, picked up three awards, including a Chf 20,000 Open Doors cash grant alongside a €8,000 development grand handed out by France’s Cnc.

Set in 1992, the project tells the true story of Dominican immigrant Lucrecia Pérez, who was brutally murdered by four neo-Nazis while living in Madrid. The attack was the first case of racism and xenophobia recognized by the Spanish State.

The projects synopsis reads: Through a visually enthralling journey intertwining colonial history, displacement, and criminal investigation, the director will delve into Lucrecia’s life as a way to explore the diaspora experience and dislocate the grand narrative of history- as she currently shares Lucrecia’s undocumented status. The present and the past connect,...

Locarno — Two movie projects which capture best the brewing revolution in Latin American filmmaking walked off with the biggest plaudits at this year’s Locarno Open Doors prize ceremony on Tuesday.

Both underscore the mindset reset among cineasts – their questioning of received wisdom accompanied by the explosion in invention being brought to low-budget filmmaking in the region.

Directed by Nicaragua’s Gloria Carrión and produced by Leonor Zuñiga, “Pantasma” took the biggest cash prize on offer, CHF25,000 from Visions Sud Est, for a project which begs to differ from Nicaragua’s Contras were U.S.-backed mercenaries.

“Pantasma” presents a more nuanced vision, based on the memoirs of former Sandinista Felix Vigil and his dawning realization, during the Sandinista-Contra War that the revolution was “fighting Nicaraguan peasants and not paid mercenaries [whch] will make him question everything he believes in,” Carrión has noted.

Fleeing Nicaragua as Daniel Ortega has increasingly suppressed...

A revolution is working through Latin American filmmaking. It’s powered by new gen cineastes, educated at top film schools, very often women, who are questioning pretty much everything everywhere all at once, re-representing themselves and questioning what can make up a movie these days.

Locarno’s Open Doors is a case in point. Five takeaways on this year’s lineup:

Recalibration of a Sense of Self

“Three Bullets,” at Open Doors Projects Hub, is made by Dominican Génesis Valenzuela, an alum of San Sebastian’s prestigious Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, which plumbs the murder of Dominican immigrant Lucrecia Pérez, shot and killed by four neo-Nazis, the same year that Spain celebrated its conquest of Latin America. Valenzuela will come in at the film as she reconstructs her own identity as a “human being/woman/Afro-Caribbean/filmmaker.” “The driving force of this film is the desire for emancipation, both from...

Directors Paz Fábrega and Gloria Carrión among those presenting projects.

Rotterdam Tiger Award winning filmmaker Paz Fábrega and exiled Nicaraguan director Gloria Carrión are among those set to present projects at this year’s edition of the Locarno Film Festival’s Open Doors programme.

The initiative, aimed at supporting independent cinema from the global south and east, is entering the second of a three-year cycle focused on Latin America and the Caribbean and takes place August 3-8 as part of the Locarno Film Festival.

Scroll down for full list of projects and participants

Open Doors will present eight projects in its Projects’ Hub co-production initiative,...

The Locarno Film Festival has announced the line-up for the 21st edition of its Open Doors program, which will focus on filmmakers from underrepresented countries in Latin America and the Caribbean for the second year running.

The program runs online in July and onsite during the festival’s Locarno Pro Days industry sidebar, running from August 3 to 9.

The eight films in development selected for its Project Hub coproduction platform include Milky Way (Vía láctea) from Costa Rican director Paz Fábrega, whose Cold Water of the Sea won the Tiger Award in Rotterdam in 2010.

Further projects include exiled Nicaraguan director Gloria Carrión’s animated hybrid work Pantasma; Jamaican director Gibrey Allen’s Raised by Goats; first-time Venezuelan filmmaker Carlos Zerpa’s Loa. Kill Your Masters (Loa. Mata a tus amos) as well as vampire western Last of the Kings by Peruvian director Victor Checa. His first feature The Shape of Things to Come...