Latin American Film Festival opens in New York

The inaugural edition of the Latin American Film Festival at New York University kicked off Thursday with a screening of the Mexican feature “Cochochi,” produced by a company owned by Mexican actors Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna.
“The goal of this festival is to bring attention to independent and innovative films that have come out of Latin America and frequently haven’t even been screened in the United States,” NYU professor Juan de Dios Vazquez, who organized the festival with colleague Alexandra Falek.
NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center is the venue for the free-admission event.
Vazquez, who said the idea is for the festival to become an annual event, stressed the importance of making the public aware of “the quality of Latin American films that opt for an independent path.”
“In recent years, there’s been a very abrupt change, resulting in cinema with greater resources and quality, yet innovative at the same time. A cinema that asks what Latin American identity is and who makes up the communities that inhabit the hemisphere,” he added.