Cinema Cartagena

Miles from the sordid lives and gruesome revenge killings that his movie depicts, Jose Antonio Dorado was trying to explain how a mild-mannered college professor like himself could become obsessed with a ruthless drug lord. Actually, as Dorado describes it, in his native city of Cali, practically everyone was fixated by the powerful and charismatic narco-trafficking capo who is the subject of Dorado’s fact-based feature film “El Rey” (“The King”).

“They said he was a very generous person who would give money to street children,” Dorado recalled. Once, it was said, El Rey gave money to a poor campesino to help him pay for his daughter’s First Communion. Among the Cali people, the king was a charismatic figure even in death, although the drug trade eventually would turn their community into a combat zone.

Out of such conflicted loyalties was modern Colombia born. And out of such complex, socially conscientious films as “El Rey,” a kind of South American “Scarface,” was the Festival Internacional de Cine y TV conceived in this sun-drenched Caribbean port on Colombia’s far northern coast.

Last week, dozens of directors, actors, distributors, producers, talent scouts and journalists from Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, Costa Rica and Spain, along with hundreds of movie buffs, converged here for the 45th edition of what is billed as Latin America’s oldest film festival. Over eight days, the event became a window into some of the Latin world’s preoccupations, including poverty, corruption, U.S. immigration, drug trafficking and brutal wars past and present. But the recently concluded festival also afforded glimpses into how Latin Americans these days are viewing love, sex, marriage, humor and the changing nature of family life.

In short, the festival seemed to achieve the vision of its founder and director, Victor Nieto, a genial octogenarian who says he started the weeklong happening in March of 1960 to boost tourism in his hometown. He probably needn’t have worried. Cartagena, a living museum of exquisite colonial-era architecture, is an island of tranquillity and openness in one of the world’s most violent and militarized places.

While Colombia’s four-decade-old civil war rages on in the country’s jungles and mountains, Cartagena sways to a relaxed Caribbean vibe. Its ethnically and culturally mixed inhabitants make music in the plazas, pray together in several magnificent churches that are undergoing restoration and play soccer together in the dusty fields below the massive stone walls that encircle the old city center.

Mecca for filmmakers

Cartagena also has a rich cinematic history. About three-dozen feature films have been shot here, including the anti-imperialist epics “Burn!” starring Marlon Brando (who was honored with a tribute at this year’s festival) and “The Mission,” with Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons. Over the years, such directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Bernardo Bertolucci have shown up for movie-related events.

“Cartagena has an ambience that is very favorable for filming,” Nieto said.”There isn’t a school, but there is a numerous group of people that knows how to make movies, that are carpenters, actors, actresses.”

But if the city’s party-time atmosphere raises images of a Caribbean Cannes minus the pretensions or Park City minus the frostbite, many of the festival’s films have an undertow of seriousness to balance the frivolity.

Still, serious doesn’t have to mean humorless. In the Venezuelan offering “Punto y Raya” (“Step Forward”), a current of darkly ironic comedy permeates the story of two soldiers fighting on opposite sides of the Colombian-Venezuelan border. When fate throws the former Caracas street hustler Cheito (Roque Valero) and the idealistic campesino Pedro (Edgar Ramirez) together, a series of tragicomic accidents ensues, exposing the absurdity of the two countries’ age-old border disputes and questioning the very meaning of nationalism.

Elia Schneider, who co-directed the film along with her partner and husband, director-producer Jose Novoa, said that “Step Forward” had played at a number of smaller U.S. festivals, including Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, won a best actor prize for Valero in Havana and was Venezuela’s official Oscar foreign film entry. But it’s still trying to find a U.S. distributor, a challenge facing many of the movies in Cartagena’s festival. “I don’t think our films are less important than the films in the U.S.,” said Schneider, who was also a member of the Cartagena festival jury.

The U.S.-Colombian co-production “Amor en Alquiler,” which roughly translates as “Love for Rent,” also uses comedy effectively to sweeten the emotionally bruising tale of a young Colombian (telenovela star Angie Cepeda) living in the United States. After losing her sleazy American husband of convenience, her car and her furniture, Sofia agrees to become artificially impregnated by an Anglo couple so she can earn enough money to study law and keep her green card.

A warm and thoughtful meditation on the varieties and vagaries of human love, “Amor en Alquiler” succeeds through its psychological subtlety and its ingratiating performances, particularly those of Cepeda, Ken Marino as a Prince Charming doctor and Max W. Burkholder as a precocious foster child.

“Amor en Alquiler” is a more honest and original variation on Hollywood Spanglish Cinderella stories like the Jennifer Lopez fluff-a-thon “Maid in Manhattan.” Executive produced by Cartagena native Alvaro Albarracin, the movie also gets a spot-on performance by Guatemalan actress Martita Roca as Sofia’s cousin. “We wanted to make a Latin film that everybody would want to go see,” Roca said after a late-night showing at one of the 16 festival theaters being used for screenings. “We wanted to show that we can make a romantic comedy too.”

On the serious side

But more troubling matters were never far from the festival’s mind. The Colombian film “Sumas y Restas” (“Additions and Subtractions”), which won the festival’s top prize at Friday night’s awards ceremony, examines the lives of youths during the 1980s and the desire to earn easy money in a society that has been morally shattered by war. Another Colombian film, “La Sombra Del Caminante” (“The Shadow of the Walker”), is a menacing, absurdist riff on urban anomie as it plays out in the lives of two damaged Bogota men who seem to have wandered in from a Ionescu play.

Among the participants who split their time between Hollywood and Latin America was Mexican director Luis Mandoki, who flew in to promote his latest, “Voces Inocentes” (“Innocent Voices”). A young boy’s view of El Salvador’s catastrophic U.S.-backed civil war of the 1980s, “Voces Inocentes” has played to enthusiastic crowds in Toronto, Mexico, El Salvador and Berlin, where it won the Crystal Bear award. But it’s still looking for a U.S. distributor.

Mandoki, however, believes that the rest of the world is recognizing the bounty of Latin cinema and willing to explore its historical and cultural byways and backwaters through recent movies like “The Motorcycle Diaries” and “Maria Full of Grace.” “There’s a big Latin American history, from Che to ‘Maria Full of Grace’ to ‘City of God,’ ” Mandoki said. “It’s not just Ricky Martin with his music.”

Not that anyone in Cartagena has anything against music. Music was everywhere during festival week: drifting over the pool at the Hotel Caribe’s festival headquarters, rising from the African drums of dancers in the old town center and blaring from fleets of creaky taxis speeding along the oceanfront.

The awards ceremony was a pleasantly informal affair where festival winners made only short speeches (if any) and were presented with small gold statues of the India Catalina, the Carib Indian woman who served as translator to the city’s Spanish founder, Pedro de Heredia. There was no red carpet, no Chris Rock jokes, no Joan Rivers and not a single Thierry Mugler gown in sight. But there was a local Afro-Colombian band halfway through the show, and they seriously rocked the house.