A new player is joining Miami’s film festival scene, and it’s showing a spotlight on cinema from across Latin America.
Taking over Silverspot Cinema in downtown Miami on Friday, Sept. 5 and Saturday, Sept. 6, NVISION Latino Film and Music Festival will showcase and celebrate movies and creators from across the Latin world. With a program including nine feature films, 10 shorts, and seven panels on subjects such as music scoring and film production financing, the event is a one-stop shop for anyone looking for inspiration and insight.
The festival is the brainchild of photographer Danny Hastings, who has shot some of the most iconic rap album covers of all time for the likes of Nas, Eminem, and Wu-Tang Clan. Hastings, who was born in California to Panamanian and Mexican parents and lived in Panama until he was 16, started the festival as a way to address the lack of Latin representation in the film industry.
“I knew that there were some challenges that we were facing, and I felt like maybe the community was feeling the same way I was feeling. So I created the festival in 2015 to try to solve that problem,” he says.
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Originally known as the Official Latino Film and Arts Festival, the festival launched in 2015 in New York and focused on short films. It moved to Palm Springs, Calif., five years later, coaxed by investment from the neighboring city of Coachella and by a less competitive environment. A rebranding to NVISION came last year – the festival’s 10th anniversary – along with a new partnership with music producer and entrepreneur Lex Borrero, who convinced them to come to Miami.
Borrero, who heads up the music management firm NEON16, is also the main force behind the festival’s increased emphasis on Latin music. The opening night presentation, the concert film “Kenia OS: La OG,” focuses on a superstar of Mexican pop music. A question-and-answer session with Kenia follows the film on Friday night.
Music is also a prominent theme in the festival’s other centerpiece, “La Ola” (“The Wave”). Directed by Sebastián Lelio, who won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for “A Fantastic Woman” in 2018, the film is a musical inspired by a series of feminist protest actions in Chile in 2018 that has been compared to the #MeToo Movement in the United States. It follows Julia, a student at a performing arts university in Santiago, who unwittingly becomes a central figure in a feminist protest that explodes on campus.
Lelio says he was interested in making a movie musical because of the challenges it presents, such as the fact that the stage musical genre is not as common in the Spanish-speaking world as it is in the United States.
“Here (in Chile), women, when they protest, they combine rights and celebration in a certain way. So it felt like a really natural territory for a musical to develop,” says Lelio. “And then as a filmmaker, I love cinema and I’m interested in many genres, but in this case, I think what was more appealing to me was precisely the risk of combining contemporary politics and political themes and challenges with the splendor and the scale and the dreamlike quality that a musical requires. I thought that that contradiction was really interesting to walk through, to try to survive it, and to try to think about what happened to all of us after the Feminist May.”
The film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. NVISION is hosting its North American premiere, an honor typically reserved for larger events such as the Toronto International Film Festival or the New York Film Festival. Lelio will be in Miami to show the film and participate in a post-screening question and answer session.
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“They invited us and we accepted, it’s as simple as that,” says Lelio. “I’m looking forward to showing the film there, since there is such a big Latino community, and seeing how it’s received.”
Other films in the NVISION lineup include “Esta Isla,” a crime drama set in Puerto Rico; “Serious People,” following a music video director in Los Angeles torn between work and missing the birth of his child; “Cuerpo Celeste,” a coming-of-age film set during the waning years of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile; and “The Wailing,” a horror film set between Argentina and Spain. Shorts such as “Pavilhão” from Brazil and “Papota” from Argentina will also screen in blocks and ahead of features.
Such a diverse list of films from around Latin America speaks to the potential that NVISION hopes to unleash in its new home. Hastings says that the move to Miami will enable the festival to reach a true plurality of Latin demographics, avoiding the regional tendencies of both Southern California, where Mexican and Central American nationalities dominate culturally, and New York, which favors Caribbeans.
“Miami got everybody, you know what I mean?” he says. “I feel like the festival is going to feel like home. I feel like we’re going to be able to offer the international community an easier place to come in and visit and hang out with us. It’s only a hop and a skip, from Colombia, from Mexico, from everybody.”
IF YOU GO
What: NVISION Latino Film and Music Festival
When: Various times on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 5 and 6. Check the full schedule.
Where: Silverspot Cinema, 300 SE 3rd St., Miami
Cost: $49.99 for one day passes; $84.99 for two-day passes; $129.99 for VIP two-day passes
Information: nvisionfestival.com
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