Colombia Passport

Films about children for adults

ENVIGADO, Corporación Otraparte. Sinfronteras is an International Festival to promote every year the approach of a social subject through contemporary movies. It is an opportunity to know important films of the last years that have been with little publicity in Colombia and knowing the last tendencies of the 7th Art and how the cinema looks to certain actual realities. This festival is also a space of integrarion, entertainment and reflexion for the people of the Aburrá Valley in Colombia.

In 2008 Sinfronteras put its attention in films and academic activities related with children and relations among adults and kids. The festival is an opportunity to know how the contemporary world has treated and asumed children in movies related to their parents, their education, their conflicts, sexuality, genre, religion and the idea of future. In this way, Sinfronteras searchs to settle in our society the attention to childhood, a subject that has been marginalized and underestimated before the emergency of the armed conflict and the confrontation of political and economical interests.

The “Sinfronteras” International Festival of Films 2008 will be celebrated between May 28 and June 8. Seven movie houses are the spaces of its program, as different academic spaces and exposition saloons. It has also the exhibition of more than 25 movies of contemporary works in 35 milimetres (never presented in Colombia) from countries like Germany, United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, France, Finland,  Sweeden, Israel and Japan, among many others. Moreover, there will be ten free DVD documentary films for the participants during the opening of the festival offered by different cultural institutions of the city like EAFIT University, Medellín Modern Art Museum (MAMM), Museum of Antioquia, Colombo-American Centre, Comfama and others. The documentary films are about how movies have assumed the role of children in different events of the world history.

Richard Peña, director of the Film Festival in New York, professor of Theory of Film in Columbia University and director of programs in the Lincoln Centre of the same city, is one of the international guest to the festival in order to offer a theoretical approach to the contemporary films.

Bahman Maghsoudlou, a critic and movie producer from Iran, will give a lecture on his vision of children in movies. His country has been famous during the 1980´s for this issue. The Iranian films approached to the children world in a regular and willing frequency, as any other country in the world.

The Argentinian-Brazilian Adriana Fresquet, a master in film production, education and children, who is the director in Rio de Janeiro of “Cinema to learn and unlearn” project of the Federal University, will have her lecture in association with the Medellín Modern Art Museum.

The Festival Internacional de Cine Sinfronteras has as a goal to have an experience of encounter and integration of the people of the Aburrá Valley, a geographical setting that gathered ten cities in what is the Metropolitan Area of Medellín, searching the common history and culture of its inhabitants.

The Festival has the support of different institutions like the Museum of Antioquia, the Modern Art Museum of Medellín, Comfenalco, Confiar Cooperativa Financiera, Comfama, Otraparte Corporation, Escuela Nacional Sindical and Municipality of Medellín.

During the Festival Colombia will debut with its movie Los últimos malos días de Guillermino, (The Last Bad Days of Guillermino) and Los niños de nadie (Invisible Children), produced by UNICEF and directed by Spike Lee, Emir Kusturika, Ridley Scott and other prominent directors.

It will be also the first time  and place in Latin America to watch the Iranian movie Buddha exploded in shame by Hanna Malakhmalbaf, the movie of Martial Fougeron, My Son; the British movie Grow with Thatcher de Shane Meadows that was selected the best English 2000 movie and the South African Sunrise by Darrell Roodt, nominated to the best foreign movie in 2005.