Latin Beat: Mexico's Feratum Announces First Details, Peru's A LOS 40 Breaks Records, Chile's Festival Darling

Feratum 2014 Reveals Its First Details
by Eric Ortiz Garcia

From October 2 to 5, the Mexican town of Tlalpujahua will be hosting again the Feratum Film Festival. During a press conference in Mexico City, the festival’s organizers revealed the first details for the 2014 edition:

• The theme will be “dolls and toys.”
• The Bilbao Fantasy Film Festival (FANT Bilbao) will be guest of Feratum.
• An exhibition of fantasy cinema from China and Hong Kong is confirmed; the films are yet to be announced.
• Gary Pullin, who was one of the festival’s guests in 2013, is the artist of the official poster, displayed in the gallery above.
• Feratum calls for entries in the following categories: International (shorts and features, fiction or documentary), National (Mexican short fictions), Script (for a fictional short film), and National Short Film through the social network VINE (make a 6 second short with your cellphone).

For more information, visit Feratum’s website.

A LOS 40 Sets A New Record At Local Box Office
by Ernesto Zelaya Minano (in Peru)

The current box office champ is A Los 40, an ensemble comedy about a group of people coming together for their high school reunion. Starring a who’s who of local comedic actors, most of them hailing from the Pataclaun theater troupe, it has attracted 748,843 viewers and grossed over $2,086,404 after eight days of release, according to Box Office Mojo. It’s become the second most successful Peruvian movie at the box office ahead of last year’s found footage horror Cementerio General (727,306 viewers).

The film comes from production company Tondero Producciones, which just last year released the comedy Asu Mare, starring another Pataclaun alum, Carlos Alcántara (who also appears here) and based on his own stand-up comedy act. It’s the biggest local box office smash of all time with an overall gross of $11 million.

Tondero isn’t resting on their laurels; they’ve got three other films set for release this year: the psychological thiller El Elefante Desaparecido, the drama Magallanes, and the mockumentary Nómades.

New Releases in Chile
by Jaime Grijalba Gomez

This week comes festival darling Las Analfabetas (aka Illiterate), directed by Moisés Sepúlveda, with Paulina García and Valentina Muhr. A review will be posted later this week.

Official synopsis: :Ximena is an illiterate woman in her fifties, who has learned to live on her own to keep her illiteracy as a secret. Jackeline, is a young unemployed elementary school teacher, who tries to convince Ximena to take reading classes. Persuading her proves to be an almost impossible task, till one day, Jackeline finds something Ximena has been keeping as her only treasure since she was a child: a letter Ximena's father left when he abandoned her many years before. Thus, the two women embark on a learning journey where they discover that there are many ways of being illiterate, and that not knowing how to read is just one of them."

continued...

Next week comes El Mago (aka The Magician), produced by a well-known magician in Chile.