BIO

Cinelandia seeks to promote U.S. Latino movies and Latin American films by offering screening information to the public and a place for filmmakers to connect their projects with audiences eager to watch Latino films. Sarah Bingham Miller (Co-Founder) Sarah’s interest in film began as a graduate student studying Soviet avant-garde film. She’s been involved with Latin American film since 1999, when she began working with a New York-based Latin American film festival.

Vanessa Erazo (Co-Founder) Vanessa has always been a big film fan. Growing up bilingual, she eventually discovered the rich variety of Latin American films but noticed they were hard to find. The search for these movies led her to work for several Latino film festivals in San Francisco, New York, and Mexico City. After receiving a Masters Degree in Latin American Studies from New York University, she served as the Documentary Programmer at the New York International Latino Film Festival and now acts as the Film Editor for Remezcla. She is also the co-creator of LatinoBuzz, a weekly column on Indiewire where she covers Latino indie films.

Following Saleny’s Footsteps

Even during the silent film era and throughout cinema history’s infancy, women have been present both in front of and behind the camera. These trailblazing pioneers often remain absent from film studies textbooks but their impact is undeniable. In Buenos Aires, Emilia Saleny transitioned from movie star to movie director in 1917 with the release of La niña del bosque making her Argentina’s very first female filmmaker.

In our curation of short films we chose to highlight the contemporary Argentine women who are following in the footsteps of Saleny despite the obstacles female directors across the globe must contend with. To our delight, the offerings were plentiful and ended up with a wide variety of selections that cover all the genres.

Two documentaries on our list both deal with immigration to Argentina but of very different types: in Hilda an older woman confronts her father’s Nazi past, while Corea focuses on homesick Koreans who came for a better future, and try to recreate their home country in their new one.

The hilarious gossiping women of Salon Royale and the melancholic El cazador es un corazon solitario touch upon stories of love, or more accurately, lost love. El Traje and La Casa, in their different ways, are about attempting to understand the past through clues inadvertently left in old homes. El Vuelo de Ati, a charming stop-motion children’s fable, is the sole animated film on the list.

The rest of our selected shorts include: Perseo, a reimagining of the myth of Medusa in a contemporary Buenos Aires apartment building; a modern-day expedition in Minimercado Champion that follows the winners of a supermarket weekend getaway; and finally, Escenas en el mar, where a filmmaker’s attempt to capture a serene seaside evening is noisily interrupted by a young boy who snaps us back to reality.

Some of the stories and themes overlap in these short films, but the one thing they share in common is a woman at the helm, expressing her singular vision from behind the camera. While enjoying these shorts, we hope that you’ll also look to the future and continue to support the gender that is still a minority in the film industry. We hope to change this disparity one step at a time.