Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012: Looking South
At this year’s EIFF, we’ll be Looking South to see what’s on offer. And don’t worry – it isn’t a collection of home videos from Kent. Looking South showcases some of the best of modern cinema from South America, featuring a mixture of documentaries, films and shorts. Among those being shown is El Casamiento, a documentary about the life of Julia, a 65 year-old transsexual who has just won a decade long struggle to have her identity recognised by the Uruguayan government. Looking South is dominated by works from Argentina (perhaps inevitably, the country having one of the most developed film industries) including a comedy-drama about two estranged brothers, Los Marziano. It also includes one of the two short films, Rosalinda, which is an As You Like It inspired offering from one of the nation’s most promising new directors, Matías Piñeiro. South American cinema is underrepresented in the Anglophone world; hopefully EIFF’s small collection is one step towards ameliorating this.