Solon Brochado: This is not exactly Brazilian news, but it is so fitting to our reality that I just had to post it. It seems some Latin-American movie directors are tired of making political movies, and demand the right to make comedies, dramas and such.

Latin directors defend the right to laugh

The Latin-American cinema reclaims its right to shoot any theme and to not being sentenced to be only a voice of social denunciation, said filmmakers Felipe Cazals and Jorge de Bernardi, who are taking part in the 20th edition of the Latin-American Movie Festival of Trieste.

“Latin America is seen in Europe as the continent that has to make politically commited movies, a cinema of social denunciation, with problems of a political nature”, says Rodrigo Díaz, the festival’s director. “It is an aberration”, comments the mexican director Cazals.

Cazals says his case is an example and that everything began during the 70s, when filmmakers started making “a fiction cinema which witnessed a reality through a critical point of view”. The audience who went to the movies “asked for this genre”, and the great traditions of cinema as melodrama and comedy were left as a second fiddle”, he says.

Rodrigo Díaz demands the right to “tell the everyday life and tell it in a thousand ways”, be it in an intimate movie, a comedy or a thriller.

Even so, with the authority of being Trieste’s director, assistant director for Latin America in Venice’s Festival and a Chilean cinephile rooted in Italy, Díaz asserts: “A Latin-American movie on social problems has a greater chance of being picked for a showing in Europe than a comedy. It seems that we have the role of making people cry for someone else’s disgraces”, he points out.

The festival has, on competition, three comedies. But the other ten films on competition, just as dozens of other documentaries being shown at the festival, reasserts the reality of the socialy commited Latin-American cinema.

Jorge de Bernardi tries to avoid this brand and directed his masterpiece “Negocios son negocios” (Business is business) in a humorous tone. For him, “art and cinema have the responsibility of giving a breath, a joy, a smile” to life.