Day 5: H-U-G-E premiere night tonight at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts, with three films back-to-back, including the Festival’s single feature from Cuba, and a new slate of international directors rolled into town to meet with Miami audiences and screen their films…

More MIFF Kodak Moments: Eastman Kodak execs offered two more chances for budding filmmakers to get behind the lens with their REEL Education Seminar Series favorite. For those who were still camera-shy, MIFF held the for-starters seminar “Makin’ Your First Film,” moderated by Miami Dade College’s School of Entertainment & Design Technology dean Barry Gordon and featuring professors/instructors Mario Beguiristain and Ece Karayalcin; Robert Parente, the longtime head of the City of Miami Mayor’s Office of Film, Arts & Entertainment; Andrea Olabarria, director of Rough Winds; and MDC grad David Orth, director of Spam Allstars: ¡Fuacata!

The Ibero-American and North American connection: Directors Héctor Gálvez and Florence Jaugey arrived today and spoke with audiences after the screenings of their big-screen efforts, both featured in the Festival’s signature Ibero-American Competition. The Festival hosted the North American Premiere at Regal Cinemas South Beach of Galvez’s debut feature Paradise (Paraíso), a coming-of-age tale about gang members growing up in the impoverished outskirts of Peru’s capital city, Lima. Buzz was building around Jaugey’s La Yuma, the first feature film shot in Nicaragua in more than two decades. The Million Dollar Baby-like tale of poor, young female boxer living in the barrios of Managua held its North American Premiere at the Tower Theater in Little Havana.   

More directors make their Miami debuts: Polish-Dutch director Urszula Antoniak, fresh from her duties at the Rotterdam International Film Festival—where she was part of the jury that gave debut director Pedro González-Rubio’s To the Sea (Alamar), an official selection in MIFF’s Ibero-American Competition, a VPRO Tiger Award celebrating first- and second-time global filmmakers—introduced Miami audiences to her own debut feature, Nothing Personal, a World Competition selection that stars renowned British actor Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) and won Best First Feature at the 2009 Locarno International Film Festival.  Chilean documentary filmmaker Cristián Leighton decided to make a film about his obsession with controversial Japanese director Naomi Kawase, called Kawase-san, and discussed his muse after the North American Premiere at the University of Miami’s Bill Cosford Cinema.  

All eyes turned to the Gusman for the premieres of three films, all with strong South Florida and MIFF connections: the latest short film by South Florida native Moe Charif, Never Winter, marks the debut of 11-year-old West Palm Beach actress Chiara Thielmann as Chloe, the true story of an abused child who plots a way to escape from her toxic mother; director Vidal Cantu’s tribute to Mexican quadriplegic activist and motivational speaker Juan Angel Ruiz, A Step from Heaven (Con los pies en el cielo), which chronicles his daily life and the support he gains celebrities, including Miami-based Brazilian artist Romero Britto and Cuban music icons Gloria and Emilio Estefan; and, the highly anticipated U.S. Premiere of the latest feature from award-winning Cuban director Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti, Kiddo (Chamaco).

Chamaco was Cremata’s third film at MIFF in recent years (Viva Cuba in 2006 and Nada Más in 2003), but was the first time he received the visa to come to Miami, and the charismatic filmmaker, who made quite the dashing display dressed like a Cuban going on an African safari, relished every moment: from interviews with The Miami Herald to a nearly 25-minute turn on the Red Carpet.  Inside the Gusman prior to the screening, Cremata shared the stage with his lead actors, Fidel Betancourt (Chamaco) and Alfredo Chang (La Chupi), the Cuban playwright Abel Gonzalez Melo who penned the controversial Chamaco (Boy at Vanishing Point) about desperate young men in Cuba who turn to male prostitution to survive, on which the film is based, and finally his Miami producer, Iohamil Navarro, who he thanked profusely, adding: “The film [didn’t] cost a hundred dollars to make. In reality, it costs two hundred dollars, so thank you, Iohamil!”

That’s a wrap!

by Dana Ballestero, Daily Wrap Editor

VIEW DAILY WRAP Day 6: Wednesday, March 10, 2010