Film of the week: The Cinema Hold Up (Asalto Al Cine) Directed by Iria Gómez Concheiro – Trailer

A somber but engaging, powerful examination of four Mexico City teenagers whose self-destructive tendencies speak volumes about the failing social systems surrounding them.
There’s a moment in the film when the main character, Negus (Gabino Rodríguez), is drawing up detailed schematics of the local megaplex cinema with an engineer’s precision. His friend Chale (Juan Pablo de Santiago) has tried getting into the prestigious Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Their friend Sapo (Ángel Sosa) is a gifted hip-hop musician. At night, they are graffiti artists, their tour de force a richly detailed mural that fuses traditional Mexican and urban artistic styles.
Yet the three friends, along with La Chata (Paulina Avalos), are bored, apathetic teenagers who spend most of

Pablo Larrain’s ‘Post Mortem’ Takes Top Prize at Cartagena Film Fest

 

Actor Alfredo Castro, actress Antonia Zegers and director Pablo Larrain attend the "Post Mortem" premiere during the 67th Venice Film Festival at the Sala Grande Palazzo Del Cinema on September 5, 2010 in Venice, Italy.

The Chile-set dark love story won the award for best film, and “La sociedad del semaforo” was voted best Colombian picture.
Chilean director Pablo Larrain‘s second feature Post Mortem won the best film award in the Cartagena Film Festival‘s fiction category. The film tells a dark love story between a lonely morgue clerk and a burlesque dancer set against the backdrop of 1973 Chile, during the days of the military coup that overthrew President Allende.
In that same slate, Peruvian filmmakers Daniel and Diego Vega won the best director award for Octubre while Natalia Smirnoff”s Berlinale entry Puzzle, from Argentina, won for best script. The best actress choice went to Claudia Celedon for American-Chilean production Gatos Viejos; the best actor was Gabino Rodriguez for Iria Gomez Concheiro‘s Asalto al cine (Mexico).
The jury for the Official Fiction Competition was formed by producer and Sundance programmer Caroline Libresco, Screen International editor Mike Goodridge, and Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein. Other non official awards for fiction films in competition included the Cinecolor Audience Award to Carlos Cesar Arbelaez‘s Los colores de la montana, the fest’s opening night film.
In the 100% Colombia section the winner was Ruben Mendoza‘s La sociedad del semaforo. The jury — comprised of Geraldine Chaplin, Cuban author and screenwriter Senel Paz, and Fabio Zapata, a visual effects director at ILM Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks in California — also awarded special prizes to Antonio Dorado‘s Apaporis, en busca del rio and Carlos Moreno‘s Todos tus muertos.
A small Latin American festival hit, Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life picked both the