Buenos Aires 2007

Three years on from the widely publicized administrative coup that saw former festival director Eduardo "Quintin" Antin replaced by Fernando Martin Peña, the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema remains alive and well, as even a cursory glance at the mammoth, 500-page catalogue quickly proves. As usual, this year's selection was a treasure-trove of rarities (Carl Dreyer's Master of the House, Budd Boetticher's Decision at Sundown), retrospectives (including D.A. Pennebaker, Luc Moullet, Hugo Fregonese and the American avant-garde filmmakers Jem Cohen, Sadie Benning and Betzy Bromberg), special "focuses" on emerging directors (including Malaysia's Ho Yuhang and Filipino wunderkind Raya Martin) and no less than five official competitive sections for new short and feature-length films from Argentina and from around the world. It was also a year that saw three generations of BAFICI directors reunited, with Quintin on hand as a festival blogger and founding director Andrés Di Tella on hand to present his new documentary, Photographs (Fotografías), which screened in the festival's official Argentinean competition. (Scott Foundas)

The FIPRESCI Prize was awarded to the Cuban-French documentary The Sugar Curtain (El telón de azúcar) by Camila Guzmán Urzúa.

Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, April 3-15
Festival's official website: www.bafici.gov.ar
Details of the FIPRESCI Prize

Reports:

Life as a House
Scott Foundas sees architecture everywhere at the BAFICI, including in Heinz Emigholz's Schindler's Houses and Federico León and Marcos Martinez's Stars.

Beyond the Sugar Curtain - Disillusion, Decay and Stoicism
A citizen of the former Communist bloc, Boriana Mateeva offers her perspective on Camila Guzmán Urzúa's prize-winning portrait of post-revolutionary Cuba, The Sugar Curtain.

Sterile Beauty
Jorge Morales looks at the BAFICI's crop of Argentinean films and finds that everything not-so-old is new again.

Women in Transit
Miguel Peirotti writes about the various young women trapped between adolescence and adulthood in such disparate films as Denmark's Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star, Germany's The Unpolished and BAFICI's grand jury prize winner, In Between Days.