The Latin American Studies Association is pleased to announce the LASA2020 Film Festival winners. The LASA Film Festival is organized in unison with the annual LASA Congresses.
The Film Festival has strived to exhibit audiovisual materials from around the world related to the multiple and diverse perspectives encompassing Latin American: its history, its socio-political and cultural development, the ongoing reality of its inhabitants, and the discourses that bound its nations and the region in general.
Best Film Award
By the Name of Tania
Directors: Bénédicte Liénard and Mary Jiménez
May 15, 6:15 pm EDT
The Amazon flows lazily through the goldmine-gashed landscape of northern Peru. Using real eyewitness accounts, directors Bénédicte Liénard and Mary Jiménez tell the story of a young woman who winds up forced into prostitution when her initially hopeful attempt to escape the stifling limitations of village life goes wrong. Step by step, she is robbed of her moral and physical integrity. The film reconstitutes a space of dignity and returns voice and identity to that which has been formally rendered nameless. With its powerful imagery, the girl’s traumatic odyssey embodies the horrific devastation visited upon the natural world by contemporary industrial society.
Best Short Documentary Award
Limbo
Director: Alexander L. Fattal
May 14, 11:30 am EDT
A oneiric journey through Alex’s life as a former FARC guerrilla leads to a reckoning with the devil inside of him. Alex tells his story of war and its legacy inside of a truck transformed into a camera obscura, a space where dreams suffuse with reality and a life in limbo is illuminated.
Special Achievement Award
The Cordillera of Dreams
Director: Patricio Guzmán
May 14, 6:00 pm EDT
Master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán's The Cordillera of Dreams completes his trilogy (with Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) investigating the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in his native country of Chile. It centers on the imposing landscape of the Andes that run the length of the country’s Eastern border. At once protective and isolating, magisterial and indifferent, the Cordillera serves as an enigmatic focal point around which Guzmán contemplates the enduring legacy of the 1973 military coup d’etat. Along the way, Guzmán interviews artists, writers, and documentarians, drawing out their conflicted feelings towards the Cordillera and its relationship to Chilean national identity and history. Unflinching in its presentation of contemporary Chile, The Cordillera of Dreams moves beyond despair and looks towards the possibilities of political change by linking the ideological struggles of the past with the inequalities of the present.
Members of the Award Committee
The members of the award committee are María Eugenia Ulfe, LASA2020 Film Festival Director, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú; Susana M. Kaiser, University of San Francisco; Fernando Vílchez Rodríguez, FILMADRID; and Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal, Colegio de Michoacán.
LASA2020 FILM FESTIVAL PROGRAM
The film descriptions are published in the language sent by the directors.
About LASA
The Latin American Studies Association (LASA) is the largest professional association in the world for individuals and institutions engaged in the study of Latin America. With over 13,000 members, over 60% of whom reside outside the United States, LASA is the one association that brings together experts on Latin America from all disciplines and diverse occupational endeavors, across the globe. LASA's mission is to foster intellectual discussion, research, and teaching on Latin America, the Caribbean, and its people throughout the Americas, promote the interests of its diverse membership, and encourage civic engagement through network building and public debate.
If you wish to interview a LASA Executive Council member, you can contact the LASA communications office at (412) 648-7929 or send an email to lasa@lasaweb.org.