The Festival: Absence: Latin America

In this chapter, I focus on a region that, in the period I cover, has had less presence at the festival. This does not mean that it is fully excluded, but rather that it has received less attention than the others I discussed in previous chapters. The absence is, after all, relative, and varies through the years in question, with Latin America at times achieving as much as 25 percent of the total viewing schedules (2005 and 2011 festivals), but mostly staying within the range of 0 percent (2001 festival) to 10 percent of films screened. The 1994 HRW annual report also mentions a Pino Solanas—Argentine filmmaker and cofounder of Third Cinema—retrospective at the 1993 festival (HRW 2014a), which suggests that the region may have had greater importance for the festival prior to 2001. Also, the remnant website that covers programming from 1995–97 mentions quite a number of films from/about the region. This is not surprising given that the festival began in 1988 with a film about the Chilean dictatorship, a regime that ended that same year, and that the fallout of the various dictatorships in Latin America began to be felt after their demise, most by the beginning of the 1990s.