Havana International Film Festival honors Cuban and Brazilian filmmakers

HAVANA, Cuba, Dec 11 (ACN) The 45th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema organized a panel dedicated to the life and career of the renowned filmmakers Sergio Giral (Cuba) and Geraldo Sarno (Brazil), whose respective fiction films Maluala and Colonel Delmiro Gouveia won the Coral Grand Prize in the first edition of the Festival in 1979.

Cinematographer Raúl Rodríguez, winner of the National Film Award, said that he first worked for Segio Giral as assistant cameraman in the making of the didactic documentary Heno y ensilaje (1962), which came and went almost unnoticed but made him realize that the director was hardly conventional at the time.

He pointed out that Sergio’s vast moviemaking culture led him to make award-winning documentaries such as La jaula (1964), Anatomía de un accidente (1970), Por accidente (1971) and Cimarrón, based on Miguel Barnet’s book “Biografía de un cimarrón” (Biography of a runaway slave), in addition to the films El otro Francisco, Rancheador, Maluala and Plácido.

As to the Brazilian Geraldo Sarno, who died in 2022, Alquimia Peña, member of the Board of Directors of the New Latin American Cinema Foundation (FNCL), described him as one of the region's most important documentarists, who played a role in the establishment of the FNCL and the Latin American Filmmakers Committee and whose work, intended to fuel critical thinking, made a great impact.