Z365" or "Festival all year round" is the new strategic point of the Festival in which converge investigation, accompaniment and development of new talents (Ikusmira Berriak, Nest); training and cinematic knowledge transfer (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, Zinemaldia + Plus, Filmmakers' dialogue); and investigation, disclosure and cinematic thought (Z70 project, Thought and Discussion and Research and publications).
Although she was born in Peru, Marlene Dermer moved with her family to the United States at a very early age. She is the co-founder, executive director and programmer of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival which is now in its fourteenth year and is one of the most important Latino film festivals in the USA.
She has come to the Festival this year as a member of the Latin Horizons Jury and confesses that she has loved cinema since she was a child. Her commitment to supporting Latino culture in the US began when she worked at the Peruvian Pavilion at the 1984 World Fair in New Orleans and discovered that American society knew so little about Latino culture that she decided that her mission in life, “was to show the variety and diversity of our culture through film, my language since childhood and a universal language that reaches you like no other can.”
Showing people this extraordinary diversity is her great challenge when programming films, “because we are one of the richest and most entertaining cultures in the world and we have thousands of stories to tell, and we clearly have the right to be on screens all over the world.”
ta Este, con historias más urbanas y más crudas. Otros presentan esa lucha por una mejor vida, o la experiencia del nuevo emigrante, de la tercera generación que ni habla español, de los sudamericanos, de los españoles … Dentro del mismo país hay mucha diversidad, visiones y experiencias diferentes” .
Mostrar todo ello es el deseo de Dermer: “Ése es mi gran reto para programar, porque yo quiero mostrar esa diversidad y también lo que nos une. Somos una de las culturas más ricas y más divertidas, y es importante presentar ese abanico. Tenemos miles de historias que contar, y sin duda, es nuestro derecho estar en las pantallas de todo el mundo”.
Marlene mantiene una impresión general muy optimista sobre la actualidad: “Yo empecé a programar hace 18 años y mi visión del cine latino es que va siempre hacia arriba. No es fácil, pero yo digo a los que empiezan que todo lo que vale la pena hay que lucharlo; nada es fácil, y hacer una película tampoco: Andy García estuvo 16 años para hacer su Lost City; mi socio Eduard James Olmos, once para American Me y a Coppola Apocalypse Now le costó 16 años”.
Pili YOLDI