Oscar award-winning Argentine director Juan Jose Campanella has planned to attend Santa Fe de Antioquia’s 12th Annual Film Festival, for five glorious nights of Latin American film selections shown under the stars.
This year the film festival features films from Mexico and Colombia as well as conferences with acclaimed international filmmakers.
“Santa Fe de Antioquia is an ideal setting for watching movies under the stars in the open air, so we devised a festival where we present various movies at night, under the stars in Santa Fe’s plazas,” explained festival founder and world-renowned Colombian director Victor Gaviria.
In addition to the presence of Gaviria, special international guests this year include Argentine director Juan Jose Campanella, famous for his recent Oscar award-winning masterpiece “El Secreto de Sus Ojos” (The Secret in their Eyes), accompanied by the film’s production manager Muriel Cabeza
This year’s central theme is revolution-style Mexican films from the 1930s onward, with complementary films from budding Colombian producers and directors in a two-day exhibition called “Caja de Pandora” (Pandora’s Box).
“Santa Fe has been a location for many Colombian movie filmings and telenovelas, yet the people who participated as extras or actors, or witnessed the recording process had never seen the films, so for the first festival we showed the films in which the people were involved, many years ago,” festival founder Gaviria added.
The Santa Fe de Antioquia film festival has come a long way from its first year, and has featured films from Japan, France, and all over Latin America. Each year the event grows larger and more spectacular. For this year’s broad theme of the Mexican Revolution, organizers “decided it was essential to include all the different aspects of the revolution, including gastronomy, literature, history, popular culture, and of course — cinema,” said Gaviria.
The director said the festival “is kind of like a party, but at the same time film studies are a central subject…we keep changing to focus on training new Colombian directors so that they can experience a universal film culture — but at the same time it is a celebration and a reunion of people to watch movies, enjoy them, and enjoy Santa Fe de Antioquia and it’s beautiful scenery.”
The festival is free for all who wish to join in the cultural and cinematic celebration, which will be held from December 7 through 11, with the entire event program available online. The charming colonial city of Santa Fe de Antioquia is located approximately 50 miles north of Medellin and is easily accessed by bus or car.