Guadalajara’s 28th International Film Festival (FICG28) gets underway on Friday, March 1 with the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden as this year’s special guests.
Over nine days, around 100,000 guests, including acclaimed actors, directors and industry professionals, will descend upon Guadalajara to catch screenings of hundreds of movies, documentaries and short films from Mexico, Latin America, the United States, Canada, Spain and the aforementioned Nordic states.
There will be 57 films from these Nordic countries shown at the festival, including a retrospective of 13 movies made by acclaimed Swedish director Jan Troell. Among the most notable Nordic movies on show is the Oscar-nominated drama “Kon-Tiki,” which will be screened at the opening ceremony at the Telmex Auditorium on Friday, March 1.Named after the Inca sun god, “Kon-Tiki” tells the true story of Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl, who in 1947 built a balsa-wood raft and sailed for 101 days from Peru to Polynesia in a bid to prove that pre-Columbian civilizations from South America could have crossed the Pacific Ocean and settled in the Polynesian islands.
Aside from film screenings, the FICG28 will also host a concert by Mexican pop-rock singer Carla Morrison at the Auditorio Telmex on March 2, an art exhibit, a series of lectures and roundtables and a forum for major distribution deals.
For the second year in a row the FICG headquarters is at the impressive Expo Guadalajara convention center – a further example of how this showcase event for Ibero-American and Mexican cinema has blossomed in recent years. Nonetheless, the competition has been slimmed down from last year, with 18 films showing in the fiction and documentary categories, compared with nearly 30 last year. The top Ibero-American and Mexican films will be automatically considered as candidates for best foreign feature at next year’s Golden Globes.
Among movie industry luminaries coming to this year’s festival is acclaimed Spanish director Fernando Trueba (Oscar-winner “Belle Epoque” and Oscar-nominated “Chico & Rita”), whose 2012 feature “The Artist and the Model” will be screened. The movie stars Jean Rochefort as an aging, world-weary sculptor in 1943 war-ravaged France who suddenly discovers a reason to live when he meets a beautiful young escapee from a Spanish internment camp (Aida Folch), who agrees to pose as his model.
Mexican actor Ernesto Gomez Cruz will be honored at the opening ceremony, while Angela Molina, star of the film “Blanca Nieves” (winner of 10 Goyas – Mexico’s Oscars), will be another esteemed guest.
The Guadalajara festival has become one of the key locations for the Ibero-American film industry movers and shakers to network and do business. But it also serves as a gathering place for aspiring filmmakers, with its subsidiary events such as the Talent Campus and DocuLab gaining more traction each year.
While the majority of the movies on show will be in Spanish, or in other languages with Spanish subtitles, several films competing for the festival’s Maguey Award, recognizing the best work with LGBT themes, will be in English.
“The festival is not only an opportunity to enjoy the international film industry and host its best productions, all the people involved in it and the amazing event it is,” FICG President Raul Padilla Lopez said at a press conference last week, “but also an occasion to highlight the fact that in Guadalajara we have the ability to hold Ibero-America’s main cinematographic event.”
Organized by the University of Guadalajara (UdeG), the National Council for Culture and the Arts (Conaculta) and the Mexican Institute of Cinematography (Imcine), the festival has screenings at the Expo Guadalajara convention center (Avenida Mariano Otero 1499), the Centro Magno Cinepolis, the Cineforo (Avenida Juarez and Enrique Diaz de Leon), the Museo de Artes (Juarez 975), the Foro Larva (Ocampo 120), the Teatro Diana (16 de Septiembre 710), the Auditorio Telmex (Obreros de Cananea 747) and the new Jalisco State Public Library (Manuel Gomez Morin 1695).
For more information on the festival (in Spanish and English), visit www.ficg.mx/28. For information on the films and screening times, download a copy of the festival program at www.ficg.mx/programademano/#/33/zoomed.