New England Festival of Ibero American Cinema 2011

Ana, a cuban woman celebrating her 35th birthday has a hard time finding friends to invite to her party. To console herself, she spends an evening reinventing the best of her past life, and wonders what has happened to her long lost friends.

José Martí was a man of great sensibility who forever marked the history of Cuba, but he was also a normal human being. The film submerges into the mundane and routine complexities that formed the character and personality of the cuban writer and patriot during his childhood and adolescence. The information is taken from Martí's writings.

Sergio, a wealthy bourgeois aspiring writer, decides to stay in Cuba even though his wife and friends flee to Miami. Sergio looks back over the changes in Cuba from the Castro revolution to the Cuban missile crisis, the effect of living in an underdeveloped country, and his relations with his girlfriends Elena and Hanna. THE FILM PLAYS AS BACKDROP TO THE EXHIBIT "THE ROADS OF MEMORY" WITH DISCUSSION BY SCRIPT WRITER EDMUNDO DESNOES.

After the death of their grandfather in a mudslide, Jairo, an itinerant photographer, and Marina, his young amnesic and mute cousin, decide to go back and try to recover the land from which she was displaced years ago. They travel from Bogotá to the coast in an old beaten Renault. During the trip, the story of her traumatic past starts to unfold. Upon reaching their hometown, paramilitares kidnap them. While attempting to flee, Jairo is wounded. Marina goes to the ruins of her family house and there she remembers the killing of her family. She returns with the deed of their land, but Jairo is fading fast. She takes him to die by the sea.

Afuera Hay Aire is a compilation piece that includes shorts from 9 filmmakers whose works debuted as part of the first “LGBTQ Outfest” Film Festival in Santo Domingo in December 2010. This documentary offers a broad and respectful look at the LGBTQ community in the Dominican Republic. It seeks to examine social prejudices around sexual orientation and identities. The film documents the lives of numerous members of the LGBTQ community, their social struggles and daily experiences living in various parts of the Dominican Republic. NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

Bianca is a somewhat young and very talented actor whose career hasn't happened yet. So in order to make a living she does small acting jobs, like impersonating movie divas and promoting events. After auditioning for a big international film, she finally gets the part. The director, inspired by her personality and her work, changes the character he wrote into a version of Bianca and makes her one of the leads. Is this the chance of a lifetime?

In 1993, Colombia's most brutal and notorious drug lord was murdered in Medellín, and his son fled to Buenos Aires to escape a dubious paternal legacy. Years later, filmmaker Nicolas Entel captures the powerful and historic moment when Pablo Escobar's eldest son finally comes forward to tell his father's story. Winner Primer Premio Coral Festival de Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano La Habana; Winner Best Documentary Miami International Film Festival Jury Award and Audience Award NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

THE TWO FACES OF THE ISLAND The world is a binary system, everything has two faces. I, an 80 years old ruin, met Reynier Ferrer, my brother’s daughter’s son, through the ether of an electronic mail. That way I discovered his passionate temperament and the doughy darkness of his paintings. People say blood is thicker than water but I believe more in the optional affinities than in those relations imposed by copulation and blood. I do not have much in common with the furies and sorrows of a close family life; I didn’t even know, in the exile, my father’s death date in Havana. But in Reynier’s words and images I have found decency and continuity. We are linked by blood, the coming and going of words and the revealing lies of a canvas body. Cuba, like everything else, has two faces: one full of colors and naive figures and another one palpitating in a dark night. To my eyes ruled by memories, Rey is a painter of roots in the hot mud. Pamela, an American friend of his family, took some of my nephew’s paintings to a gallery in Philadelphia and the curator told her: “This is not Cuban painting; where are the colors, the tropical imagination?” Many people remember the impressionist painting La Jungla by Lam and they forget his pieces full of sinister threats, they forget Rumor de la Tierra. Reynier also continues Guido Llinas’ subtle searches with passionate textures forty years later. He is in love with the matter of feelings like Portocarrero or Milián. His passionate naked imagination reveals the distant line of the horizon or the sinuous course of deep rivers murmuring in the caves towards the silent and eloquent lips of a woman. My nephew’s abstract paintings suggest to me concrete images, precise feelings, hence the titles that came up when encountering his canvases, which appeared for the first time in my computer like stained glasses a couple of years ago. Even Martí was reflected in the tenderness of the shades and the power of the darkness: “I have two homelands, Cuba and the night”, “dark evenings attract me as if the extensive shadow is my homeland”. In our island there are murmuring feminine palm trees that give us life and wide ceibas where we can be hung. My favorite and contradictory image of our island was given to me by Neruda: “The scar covered by the foam”. EDMUNDO DESNOES