10 standout Latinos at the @sundancefest via @NBCLatino

Gael Garcia Bernal attends the “Who Is Dayani” premiere during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival at The Marc Theatre on January 17, 2013 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Getty Images)

With compelling coming-of-age movies like Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s “C.O.G.” and biting political dramas like Gael Garcia Bernal’s “No,” Latino stars brought fresh ideas to the lineup of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Filmmakers, actors and writers descended on Park City, Utah to showcase the best in independent film-making at the moment.  Scroll down to take a look at Hollywood’s  newest and most innovative stars.

Gael Garcia Bernal

Gael Garcia Bernal definitely made a statement at Sundance with two fiery films rooted in politics. His first film, “No,” depicts Pinochet-era Chile and an ad executive’s campaign to defeat his re-election bid. The film is already up for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of the Year. His second film, “Who is Dayani Cristal?,” follows Bernal as he tries to uncover the identity of an anonymous body in the Arizona desert. The film touches on issues of  U.S.- Mexico relations, immigration,  border security and the value of a human life.

Pablo Larrain’s ‘No’ to Kick Off Morelia Film Fest

Actor Gael Garcia Bernal will also attend opening night ceremony.
The Morelia International Film Festival is celebrating its 10th anniversary next week with an opening-night screening of Pablo Larrain‘s critically-acclaimed drama No.
Festival organizers announced on Thursday that Chilean director Larrain will attend the festival, as will lead actor Gael Garcia Bernal.
A fact-based drama about a man who helped topple the Pinochet regime in Chile, No won the Art and Essai Cinema Prize (CICAE) at Cannes earlier this year. Closing this year’s edition of Morelia, one of Mexico’s top film events, is the Wes Anderson comedy Moonrise Kingdom.

2012 Fall Movie Preview: What Latino Films Are on the Market?

“No” by Pablo Larrain

This season Latinos will dominate the big screen with some of the biggest stars in big blockbuster films and some acclaimed indie films.
End of Watch will be released on September 21 by Open Road films. The film will star Mexican-American actor Michael Pena, America Ferrera and Jake Gyllenhaal. The film tells the story of two young officers who are marked for death after confiscating a small cache of money and firearms from the members of a notorious cartel, during a routine traffic stop. Why should Latinos watch it? The film is garnering great reviews out of Toronto Film Festival and Michael Pena’s performance is garnering Oscar consideration.

Won’t Back Down will be released September 28 by Warner Brothers. “Won’t Back Down” stars Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rosie Perez and Guatemalan actor Oscar Issacs and tells the story of two

Garcia Bernal honoured at Locarno film festival

Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal has become one of the youngest stars to receive Locarno Film Festival’s Excellence Award, at just 33.
He was in Switzerland to accept the career prize ahead of a screening of his new film No.
Garcia Bernal found international fame after playing a young Che Guevara in Walter Salles’ 2004 road-movie The Motorcycle Diaries.

How NYC Became a Capital of Latin American Film in a Decade

A scene from Karim Aïnouz's "Love for Sale/Suely in the Sky." [Photo courtesy of Cinema Tropical

It’s hard to name a specific year as the launching-point of the renaissance that Latin American cinema has experienced over the past decade. What is hardly debatable, however, is the significant increase in exposure and presence that the cinema from that region has accomplished in such a time-span. The last ten years have proved to be tremendously influential for Latin American films and the people who make them, providing opportunities that were unimaginable a generation before. Previously hindered by an imposing multitude of production difficulties, the films that were able to get made would face the near impossible task of finding screens at home and abroad. This is hardly the case today, and New

The Guadalajara Film Festival is over one-quarter of a century old but isn’t able to do a face-lift

Amador

The Guadalajara Film Festival is over one-quarter of a century old, and the long-established platform for the annual launch of Mexico’s new films, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t able to do a face-lift.
From leadership to venues to even the website, there’s a new look to the festival. With the departure of fest topper Jorge Sanchez and program director Lucy Virgen, Guadalajara has turned to a pair of cinephiles with roots in the film archive world: Ivan Trujillo has taken the reins as exec director, while Gerardo Salcedo has assumed programming responsibilities. Trujillo, who completed a stint as Mexico’s cultural attaché in Cuba just before his appointment,

Film of the week: “Even the rain” by Icíar Bollaín (Review & Trailer)

By Chris Barsanti
Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002.
A director shooting a gripping epic about the tyranny of Christopher Columbus gets a lesson in humility in Icíar Bollaín‘s potent satire about First World humanitarian hubris running up against Third World realities. Ironies pop like flares against the deceptively cozy film-about-a-film structure (a modern-age trope given layered resonance by having the whole production being shot by an earnest documentarian). Though the film as a whole is about as subtle as an anti-imperialist polemic by Howard Zinn — it’s actually dedicated to the late, truculent left-wing historian — and not without some serious structural flaws, its burning spirit has an unimpeachable potency.

Playing another variation on one of his holy fools, Gael García Bernal is Sebastien, a Spanish writer/director obsessed with telling the true story of a 16th-century Dominican monk who railed against the bloody terror wrought by the conquistadors on the New World’s natives. While Sebastien appears at first to have a creative purity of spirit, the film’s first scenes make clear how much he’s willing to compromise in order to get his film made. Driving through the Bolivian mountains with his producer, Costa (a solid, enigmatic Luis Tosar), Sebastien complains at first about how little the mountainous setting and Quechua locals

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.

How Bolivian Juan Carlos Aduviri won big film role

Juan Carlos Aduviri is passing on his experience at El Alto's film school

Juan Carlos Aduviri owes his passion for film in large part to a knife-wielding, gun-toting Vietnam War veteran.
He was eight years old and his brother took him to the cinema for the first time.
“It was showing Rambo. And that day I realised what I wanted to do. When I left the cinema, I said: I want to make films,” he says.
Aduviri, an indigenous Aymara from Bolivia, has now realised his dream, having been nominated for Best Newcomer award at Spain’s main film awards, the Goyas, which take place on 13 February.
The nomination recognises his performance in Even the Rain, a Spanish film set during the real-life protests of more than 10 years ago in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba against the planned privatisation of water services.
It tells the story of Sebastian, played by Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal, who travels to Cochabamba to make a historical film about the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

Hefty Latin American Presence in this Year’s Nominations to Spain’s Goya Awards

The Spanish Academy of Film Arts and Sciences (Academia de las Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas de España) announced today the nominees for its annual Goya Awards which have an important Latin American component. The Mexican/Spanish co-production Biutiful by Alejandro González Iñárritu earned eight nominations to the Awards, none for Best Film or Director though; whilst the film Lope directed by Brazilian filmmaker Andrucha Waddington was nominated for seven awards mostly in the technical categories, including the nomination for Best Song for Que el soneto nos tome por sorpresa composed by Uruguayan musician Jorge Drexler.
Additionally Iciar Bollaín‘s film También la lluvia / Even the Rain, shot in Bolivia and starring Gael García Bernal, was nominated for awards -none for the Mexican actor though. For Best