A film fiesta is set to spice up Richard White Lecture Hall on East Campus Sunday.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the North Carolina Latin American Film Festival, a celebration of films and filmmakers whose origins span from Brazil to Cuba. The cinematic events are spread across six North Carolina college campuses. Duke will host three days of the month-long festival.
Festival attractions on campus will include a matinee of short films and a screening of a never-before-seen feature film. Duke's Sunday screening of Hasta la Ultima Piedra (Until the Final Stone), a film about the conflict between military and guerrilla groups in Colombia and the peacekeeping efforts of local farmers, will be introduced by Renato Ariza, the leader of the Peace Communities.
There will also be a performance of capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian ritualistic dance and martial arts form, by North Carolina-based Grupo Capoeira Brasil.
Sharon Mújica is the festival's creator and director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the festival's creator. Mújica arrived in Chapel Hill in 1986 after living in Mexico for 20 years.
"Twenty years ago in the whole Triangle area there was just nothing from Latin America," Mújica said. "There were hardly any restaurants, there were no tiendas, there were very few people and people hadn't really traveled a lot to Latin America because there was always this fear of Latin America as a big dark hole that you might fall into."
In an effort to expose the larger public and student community to Latin America's rich culture, Mújica turned to her passion: film. The festival found its humble beginnings at UNC with just three films and expanded to a 16-campus radius in 2005. Mújica decided to trim the 16 sites down to six core locations this year.
The screenings are scheduled so no festival event conflicts with any other. Attendees are given the opportunity to hop from place to place to get the full flavor of films from different regions.
Marcela Fernández Violante, a renowned female filmmaker from Mexico, will speak Nov. 18 at the third event held at Duke.
Festival presenters will also include faculty members from each of the six campuses. The feature film Favela Rising will be introduced by John French, an associate professor of history at Duke and former director of the Carolina and Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean studies, which also sponsors the festival.
"The film is about Brazil, which is a country I work on. It's about an initiative working with people who live in slums- favela is a term for 'shanty town' or 'slum' in Brazil," French said. "This is a particular consciousness-raising activity, a leadership that emerged among young people that uses music and culture in order to build the incentive within communities that are very poor and much afflicted with problems."
"Latin American is a big region and there are certain areas we hear about more than others," said Hank Okazaki, exhibitions programmer of Duke's Program in Film/Video/Digital. "This is an attempt to get to know more about them."
Many of the screenings will be followed by discussions with guest speakers, which in past years have been an engaging opportunity, Mújica said.
Although the film festival and consortium are geared toward cultural outreach to local Hispanic communities, French said both provide prime opportunities for students interested in Latin America to take advantage of opportunities the University offers.
Students can apply for grants from the consortium's Mellon Undergraduate Research Endowment-which previously peaked at $6 million-in order to independently research in the region.
"I think Latin America is exciting, it's happening, it's where amazing things are going on," French said. "We finance students to go out and do what it is Duke is all about, which is doing their own thing-coming up with projects, pursuing them, building expertise, making contacts and having an adventure that leads somewhere."?
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