La Subterránea is a platform that seeks to show independent cinema films that address social problems in Panama and the region that are not usually seen in commercial cinema. The idea is to encourage conversation or debate on these topics.
With this mission in mind, the La Subterránea team projects refreshing or rare films for the Latin American market. Movies are shared in different ways with live broadcasts or on-demand selection. If things improve, the project could be in theaters.
One of the films that we can see on the platform is the Brazilian Bacurau, winner of the jury award at the Cannes Film Festival, France, which tells the story of Teresa, a young woman who returns to her village in Brazil after the death of her grandmother. There she is immersed in a series of sinister events that terrify the residents of the place.
Another of the films that brings us closer to the rich narrative catalog in which independent cinema is constituted is Light days, a Central American co-production in which Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua collaborated.
Light days it weaves the stories of each Central American country around a mysterious five-day blackout caused by a solar storm that affects more than 47 million people.
The characters confront themselves with the past and with the challenge of living without being connected to electricity, that technology that has marked the last century of human existence.
Site creation
La Subterránea is an audiovisual distributor founded by three filmmakers and film festival directors: the director of the Panalandia Film Festival, Said Isaac; the former programming manager of the International Film Festival of Panama (IFF Panama, for its acronym in English), Fanny Huc and the filmmaker Cat Caballero, who served as guest manager and programming assistant at IFF Panama.
Huc, who is part of the founding team of La Subterránea, said that the platform has a particular interest in disseminating auteur cinema, independent and especially produced in Latin America.
In this way, he said, it is intended to do a film dissemination work throughout the year, not only when the opportunity arises to disseminate these films at different film festivals.
“We decided to create a space, not only to attend to the need to show these types of films, but so that there is also a space to discuss them, to promote opinion about the tapes and the messages they convey,” he said.
But, what difference is there between a commercial tape and an independent one? Huc believes that it is the position that the director takes in front of the same story, the way to tell it.
Another sign of identity of this type of cinema is the origin of the author, a factor that may well serve to contribute the experience of the director.
“Independent cinema or auteur cinema is more linked to who is telling the story while commercial cinema is more focused on what people would like to see and how that would be more profitable,” added Huc.
La Subterránea seeks to be a meeting point so that the Panamanian public can enjoy independent cinema and promote that rapprochement between cultures that fosters understanding and discussion of the problems that afflict us as citizens.
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