Ethnic Branches of Newport Film Fest Stumble Out of Gate

Festival del Cine--the Spanish-language component of the fourth Newport Beach International Film Festival--had a hot-cold reception in its weekend debut in downtown Santa Ana. The festival is screening 12 Spanish-language movies--up from seven last year--from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Spain and Venezuela.

“It’s very rare to see good [Spanish-language] movies that don’t have sex or violence in them,” said Patricia Mondragon, who brought her 81-year-old mother to see Mexico’s “Take It or Leave It” early Saturday afternoon at Teatro Fiesta in Santa Ana.

Average attendance was far below the theater’s capacity of 350 for most of the Festival del Cine films, with nighttime shows not surprisingly drawing larger crowds.

A few miles away, about 100 people attended Cine screenings of “Divine” and “Sleepwalker” at the South Coast Village Theatre in Santa Ana.

Sunday night’s screening at Teatro Fiesta of one of Spain’s most lauded recent films, “Open Your Eyes,” attracted a three-quarters-full house, but films shown Saturday afternoon didn’t fare as well. Some viewers walked out of the nearly empty theater for the mostly English-language film “Vengeance in the Jungle,” a U.S.-Spain collaboration.

“Part of the film festival is to educate audiences about the cross-pollination of productions,” said Robert Cano, coordinator of Festival del Cine. “It’s a learning experience for us as well.”

Next time, he said, films that are not in Spanish will be listed as such.

Still, organizers said they were happy with the number of people the festival drew on a bare-bones advertising budget. They credited word-of-mouth for much of the attendance.

Many who attended said they heard about the festival through their regular channels of information: local and regional Spanish-language publications. Bilingual and non-Latino moviegoers said they read about the festival in their newspapers or heard about it on radio.

Luis Arritola, an editor for La Union Hispana, a Spanish-language weekly covering local events, said festival organizers were right on target by bringing Festival del Cine to the downtown Santa Ana area. He said he hopes publicity efforts will start earlier for next year’s festival.

“[Teatro Fiesta] is the most-attended theater by Latinos in Santa Ana. To showcase top-quality films rather than the usual bad flicks helps elevate awareness that there is good art coming out of Latin America and Spain,” Arritola said.

Many recent immigrants, especially those from rural parts of Mexico, are not accustomed to seeing indie-style films, he said. But those from urban centers and who have a sense of fine art crave these films.

Mexican immigrant Luis Rivera, 26, drove from Maywood in southeast Los Angeles to Teatro Fiesta to see the Sunday afternoon showing of “The First Night,” a film about teenage angst set in Mexico City.

“I have an interest in variety,” he said as a half-capacity crowd exited the theater. “But I also came to support independent film from Mexico. Usually we get basura [trash] about drug dealers, shootouts and cheap porn. Hopefully more films like these are shown here.”

Before the screening of “Open Your Eyes,” which has garnered 10 Goya nominations in Spain’s equivalent of the Academy Awards, Cano announced that the movie, in limited release, will play in April at Teatro Fiesta.

Mexican-born Francisco Diaz, who has lived in the region for 40 years, reminisced over Santa Ana’s “golden age” of movie premieres. The now defunct Yost Theatre downtown and the West Coast Theatre at 3rd and Main streets premiered some of the great films of the Golden Age of mexican cinema in the ‘40s and ‘50s, he said.

“Movie premieres were special. Everyone would be in their Sunday best when they went to the movies,” he said. “If [Festival del Cine organizers] could do that again, a lot more people will come.”