New York, Apr 28 (EFE).- The Colombian Film Festival in New York celebrates ten years in which it has been bringing to the city the most recent of its filmography, its culture and protagonists, becoming a window that has allowed many Colombians to be close to the country to which they have not been able to return.
“When we presented the first festival, we wanted to promote the culture of our country in New York and to make Colombian cinema known,” Juan Carvajal, its director and founder, told EFE, who admits that reaching this first decade “has not been easy.”
However, -he adds- “we realized that it meant much more, especially for migrants, who somehow felt connected, who returned to the place where they were born, which they had not seen for a long time, and saw it through the big screen experience that I fight to keep alive.
According to the organizers, the festival (colfilmny.com), between May 4 and 7, will screen 22 films this year, including documentaries that pay tribute to the pianist, percussionist, composer, and director Edy Martínez (1942 ), a legend of classical salsa and Afro-Latin music, and the King of Vallenato, the accordionist Egidio Cuadrado (1953), who will attend the presentations.
“Viva Edy!, by Carlos Ospina, opens the festival, and tells the story of the evolution of Latin jazz and salsa in the 50s in New York through this Colombian musician, followed on the 5th and 6th by “Regreso to Escalona” by Sergio Iván Rodríguez.
The latter presents Egidio Cuadrado together with the singer Carlos Vives -in whose band he has played the accordion for 30 years- on a trip to find a lost notebook of the composer Rafael Escalona.
Carvajal points out that at the festival “people face a screen, laugh, are moved, share feelings with the person next to them,” unlike in his country, where “people don’t watch Colombian cinema.”
The films, which also include short films, were made during 2022 and are US premieres except for two that were restored by the Colombian Film Heritage Foundation to be shown at the festival.
One of them, “Bolívar is me”, by the well-known director and screenwriter Jorge Alí Triana, is about a Colombian actor who went crazy and believed he was Bolívar, and “Confesión a Laura” by Jaime Osorio Gómez, which recounts the assassination of a presidential candidate in Colombia, he points out.
It stands out that music will also be present with “Catapum, I have nowhere to fall”, by Paula Abadía, about three singers who found in the song of Bullerengue (inherited from slaves) a way of resisting, healing and celebrating life.
The armed conflict that Colombians have lived through for years also returns to the festival in films such as “La Bonga”, by Sebastián Pinzón and Canela Reyes, in which a threat from a paramilitary group forced a Maroon community to leave everything and flee and the hardness of the street where the law of the strongest prevails with “Un varón”, by Fabián Hernández.
“The festival, through the stories we have had, has told a little about the history of the country and is a reflection of how our cinema is changing, how it is growing and maturing,” he said.
(c) EFE Agency
2023-04-28 23:28:00
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