Aug 19 & 20: City to host two-day Argentine film festival

Kolkata: Months ahead of the Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF), which is eagerly awaited every year by film enthusiasts, a two-day Argentine Film Festival is all set to kick off in the city at Nandan from Monday.

The festival is being jointly organised by the Embassy of the Argentine Republic, New Delhi and Forum for Film Studies and Allied Arts. The festival will screen Argentine cinema on August 19 and 20 from 3:30 pm onwards at Nandan-III. It will be inaugurated by Marcelo Boffi, head of the consular section in the embassy while eminent film scholar and author Indranil Chakravarty will speak on Argentine cinema as the chief guest.

The festival will kick off with the film Roma by Adolfo Aristarain. The film is about an author whose sudden encounter with a journalist disrupts his years of solitary life and compels him to revisit memories of his childhood and youth in Buenos Aires, and of his mother, Roma. The other film Esperando A Carroza by Alejandro Doria brings to focus a “peaceful family” which soon spirals into turbulence over who would take care of the matriarch. A sudden death of a woman draws out the complexity in relationships between the members of the family who prepare for her funeral.

The two other films scheduled to be screened are Casas De Fuego by Juan Bautista Stagnaro and Elsa Y Fred by Marcos Carnevale. Casas De Fuego recreates the life of Dr Salvador Mazza, a pioneer in the fight against tropical and social diseases who built the most conclusive empirical evidence of Chagas disease which currently affects more than 20 million people throughout Latin America.