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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
September 18, 2008
September 18, 2008
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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Film festival broadening its scope By Marco Carbajal THE PAN AMERICAN
Every February, film buffs brave the bitter cold and descend on Park City, Utah, for the latest in independent film at the Sundance Film Festival. Every September, however, the Rio Grande Valley has its own indie event and luckily under much milder weather conditions. The 15th annual CineSol Film Festival officially kicked off Friday with a reception at the Cine El Rey, at 311 S. 17th St. in McAllen. The annual two week event will run this year from Sept. 12 through Sept 27. The festival began in 1993 as a platform for Latino-inspired films, that related to the Latino people and culture. In recent years though, CineSol has broadened its scope to include films from many different regions and ethnic backgrounds and even begins with a special competition called the 36-hour film race. In the race, groups draw a film genre from a hat and have 36 hours to write, shoot, and edit a 4-to-10-minute film. This year’s winner, Finding Cochino, which roughly tanslates to “finding nasty,” from Orange Media is a “mockumentary” that follows the rise and fall of a famous porn star. The Orange Media team is made up of a group of co-workers from Entravision Communications who enjoy dabbling in extracurricular film projects outside of work. Like most filmmakers in the area, the Orange Media group believes that the RGV film scene is defintiely catching on. In just one year, the 36-hour Film Race grew from 13 to 23 teams. “I think the film scene here is definitely growing with events like CineSol,” said Finding Cochino director Edward Cordero, 34, a production
Design by Rick Gamez
photographer and editor with Entravision Communications. Area filmmakers like Cordero are sure to reap the benefits from the growing support of their art through events like CineSol. “We focus on great films and filmmakers, whether it be local, Latino, or otherwise,” said Henry Serrato, a 1997 University of Texas-Pan American graduate and CineSol board member from Harlingen. “We are in support of independent filmmaking in general.” AROUND THE GLOBE The growth of CineSol is further illustrated by a range of submissions from 12 different countries. Of 150 possible films, 44 were chosen for the festival and will be screened at venues like Cine El Rey, UTPA and UTBrownsville in the span of the two week event. “We have documentaries, horror, drama, shorts, animation, and local films, and we will be showing films from Spain, Thailand, Mexico, Chile and Australia,” Serrato added. Director Lav Bodnaruk was one such international entry. Hailing from Brisbane, Australia, he entered his comedy, The Pain of the Macho, after a friend told him about the CineSol opportunity. The Pain of the Macho follows a Latin Lothario, or lover, who tells the story of how after years of meaningless sex, he meets and loses the girl of his dreams in one night. The film short was inspired by the play of the same name by Latino playwright Rick Najera. “I’ve been making my own independent films for 10 years,” says Bodnaruk, a 2002 graduate of Queensland College of Art in Australia. “Festivals like CineSol are a great way to get your work noticed. My only hope as a filmmaker is to get it out
there and entertain people.” Much close to home, the short film Mark’d was also featured at the festival, and included a short Q&A with the cast and crew afterward. Mark’d, from 21-year-old director Ali Naqvi of Mission, is the story of four assassins who all claim to have made the same hit, on the same day, at the same place and same time. Naqvi, a 2008 UTPA theater/TV/film graduate, co-wrote the piece with fellow alum Bull Sanchez, and admits their story came about organically. “Bull and I wrote the story, then when we were casting, it evolved into something different,” said Naqvi. “Then when we shot it, it became something different again. It has come so far from what we thought it was going to look like. But that’s the evolution of filmmaking.” Naqvi, like a growing number of local artists, chose to remain in the Valley and help change the industry from within. “I had the opportunity to move to Los Angeles or Austin,” he said. “But I decided I was going to stay down here for awhile and help the film scene grow. With passion for filmmaking and festivals like CineSol, it’s possible to have success anywhere.” Serrato added that in addition to entertainment, CineSol is a wonderful networking opportunity for anyone interested in filmmaking, whether they be lighting technicians, writers, makeup artists, or actors. Another local director who was on hand for Q&A was Charles Brenner, a 26-year-old from San Juan whose film, Mason Dixon, is generating an impressive amount of buzz. Mason Dixon invites viewers to a small town where the real mafia lives. The Mason family is on a quest for revenge against the corrupted political
Dixon family. When a feud ignites, it brings the past associations of both families into question. “It’s a look at corruption in a small town,” explained Brenner. “It deals with brotherhood, good over evil, and nature versus nurture.” Brenner, a 2008 graduate of UTPA, used the Valley as inspiration for a realistic approach to the classic mob drama. “On The Sopranos and stuff like that, it’s exaggerated and blown up,” he noted. “But here or anywhere, the people who really do this stuff are not necessarily glorified or rich. They’re almost normal.” Brenner’s film has also been screened at the Big Bang Film Festival in Philadelphia and the Southern Winds Festival in Oklahoma, garnering the attention of some film executives from Los Angeles with whom he has a meeting later this month. He’s the perfect example of how growing film festivals like CineSol no doubt have a big hand in helping bring films to larger audiences and, as Serrato also pointed out, provide a chance to see up-and-coming talent viewers won’t see featured elsewhere. “You are not going to see these movies at Cinemark or Carmike,” Serrato says. “CineSol is the only venue to see these films.” This year’s CineSol wasn’t without a few glitches, however. Hurricane Dolly extensively damaged venues such as the South Padre Island Convention Center and the Harlingen Municipal Auditorium, leaving board members scrambling to secure the new location at Cine El Rey. Both opening and closing weekends have a cover charge of $30, and admission to the festival ranges anywhere from free screenings to $20 for an allday ticket depending on the film, loca-