Cinema Tropical, the non-profit media arts organization and leading presenter of Latin American cinema in the United States, announces the nominees competing for Best U.S. Latino Film of the year in the 9th annual edition of the Cinema Tropical Awards. 
 
Those nominated are the documentary films 306 Hollywood by Elan and Jonathan Bogarín and The Sentence by Rudy Valdez, along with the fiction films Blindspotting by Carlos López Estrada, Monsters and Men by Reinaldo Marcus Green and Nobody’s Watching by Julia Solomonoff.

Five of the nominated films premiered at the last edition of the Sundance Film Festival: López Estrada’s debut feature Blindspotting was the opening night film of the festival, while the Bogarín siblings’ debut feature 306 Hollywood was the opening night film of the NEXT section—and the first ever documentary to receive this honor. 

The Sentence was the winner of the Audience Award in the U.S. Documentary competition, and Monsters and Men was the winner of the Special Jury Award for Outstanding First Feature. The New York Times Critics’ Pick Tyrel had its world premiere in the U.S. Dramatic competition. Solomonoff’s Nobody’s Watching premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival where it received the award for Best Actor.

A jury composed of film critic and journalist Manuel Betancourt, film professional Christine Dávila, and Monika Navarro, Senior Director of Programs at the Tribeca Film Institute, will select the winner, which will be announced along with Latin American winners for the year’s Best Film, Best First Film, and Best Director, whose nominees were announced last week, at a special evening ceremony at The New York Times Company headquarters in New York City on Thursday, January 10, 2019. 

The winning film will be showcased along the other Cinema Tropical Awards winners as part of the Cinema Tropical Festival at Museum of the Moving Image, which will take place February 1-3 in New York City.

All the fiction and non-fiction films under consideration had a minimum of 60 minutes in length, premiered between April 1, 2017, and March 31, 2018, and were directed by Latino filmmakers based in the U.S.

About Cinema Tropical and the Cinema Tropical Awards
New York-based Cinema Tropical (CT) is the leading presenter of Latin American cinema in the U.S. Founded by Carlos A. Gutiérrez and Monika Wagenberg in 2001 with the mission of distributing, programming and promoting what was to become the biggest boom of Latin American cinema in decades, CT has brought U.S. audiences some of the first screening of films such as Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También. Through a diversity of programs and initiatives, CT is thriving as a dynamic and groundbreaking 501(c)(3) non-profit media arts organization experimenting in the creation of better and more effective strategies for the distribution and exhibition of foreign cinema in this country.  In 2011, in occasion of the organization's tenth anniversary, The Museum of Modern Art paid tribute to the work of Cinema Tropical with the special series ‘In Focus: Cinema Tropical.’ The Cinema Tropical Awards were created in 2010 to honor excellence in Latin American filmmaking, and it became the first international award entirely dedicated to honoring the artistry of recent Latin American cinema. In its inaugural year, the Awards were given to the Ten Best Latin American Films of the Aughts.