Mexico City 2007 — FICCO

"Copacabana" by Martin Rejtman (Argentina)

"Festival Internacional de Cine Contemporáneo de la Ciudad de México". The "International Festival of Contemporary Cinema" in the Mexican capital is a new event, founded in 2004 only, now in its 4th edition, and organized by a young team of enthusiasts. Their aim: to offer an overview on worldwide independent cinema, outside the mainstream, addressed to (and in the meantime accepted by) the cine-public in the city. The festival shows a good selection of recent films from all over the world, and has a special interest in Latin American cinematographies (including Mexico of course). Feature films and documentaries are equally considered. Foreign guests can catch up in particular with recent Latin American feature films, and can win an impression on developments in Latin American documentaries.
Our critics' jury saw the documentaries and awarded two prizes, to Copacabana (international documentary competition) by Martin Rejtman, one of the founders and protagonists of New Argentinean Cinema, and to Ser isla (competition of digital Mexican docs) by Eun-hee Ihm.

Details of the Prize
International Festival of Contemporary Cinema, Mexico City, February 21 — March 4, 2007: www.ficco.com.mx

Reports

A New Wave of Latin American Documentaries. Recent Latin American documentaries are showing different and original approaches to the history of the continent. Diego Lerer presents four of them: Paradise (Felipe Guerrero, Colombia), Copacabana (Martin Rejtman, Argentina), The Time That Rests (José Luis Torres Leiva, Chile) and Ser isla (Eun-hee Ihm, Mexico). "In spite of their differences, these four films grab the viewer by their senses and their intuitions." More
Freedom in the Face of The Other. Argentinean filmmaker Martin Rejtman shot his first documentary, Copacabana, about how a community of Bolivians in Argentina actually do live — and thrive — together. Robert Koehler writes: For Rejtman "to convey the essence of a poor but vibrant group of Bolivian workers living in the dusty outskirts of Buenos Aires, and to inject a sense of cultural victory against considerable odds, represents an interesting case of a filmmaker capturing a sense of hope running counter to a trend in documentary cinema that indulges in depressive anthropological thinking." More
Beautiful Insights Into a World Without Pity. "The film  works like a mirror: Without any denouncing gestures, it reflects the extent of estrangement from and the suppressed and even lost relationships to the sources of food in a job-sharing and abundant society", strikes Petra Castell the balance, in her review of Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter's doc Our Daily Bread. More

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