The Mexican feature Fauna by Nicolás Pereda was announced as the winner of the top award for Best Latin American Film of the Year at the 12th Annual Cinema Tropical Awards, which were announced this evening in a special online ceremony.
The Brazilian filmmaker Madiano Marcheti was the winner of the Cinema Tropical Award for Best Director for Madalena, while the Mexican film All the Light We Can See (Toda la luz que podemos ver) by Pablo Escoto was the winner of the award for Best First Fiction Film. The jury decided to give the award for Best Documentary to two films: Colombia’s The Calm After the Storm (Como el cielo después de llover) by Mercedes Gaviria and Argentina’s Splinters (Esquirlas) by Natalia Gayaralde.
The jury gave the Cinema Tropical Award for Best U.S. Latinx Film to Landfall by Cecilia Aldarondo and Through the Night by Loira Limbal. This marks the second time that Aldarondo takes the award for Best U.S. Latinx Film, after her debut feature Memories of Penitent Heart in 2018.
The Latin American winners of this year’s Cinema Tropical Awards were selected by a jury panel composed of Isabel Fondevila, Director of Programming at The Roxie Theater in San Francisco; Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, Founding Artistic Director of the Sag Harbor Cinema and member of the selection committee of the Venice Film Festival; Haden Guest, Director of the Harvard Film Archive; Jaie Laplante, Executive Director of the Miami Film Festival; Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis; and Josh Siegel, Curator of the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The U.S. Latinx Awards was selected by filmmaker Cristina Ibarra (Las Marthas, The Infiltrators); Alejandro Riera, film critic, publicist, and Movies & TV Editor at Mano: a Latino Counterculture Magazine; and Juan Cáceres, Senior Programmer at the Urbanworld Film Festival.
All the films under consideration had a minimum of 60 minutes in length and premiered between March 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021.
Cinema Tropical’s programs are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.
Complete List of Winners — 12th Annual Cinema Tropical Awards:
- Best Film: Fauna by Nicolás Pereda, Mexico/Canada.
- Best Director: Madalena by Madiano Marcheti, Brazil.
- Best First Fiction Film: All the Light We Can See (Toda la luz que podemos ver) by Pablo Escoto, Mexico.
- Best Documentary: The Calm After the Storm (Como el cielo después de llover) by Mercedes Gaviria; and Splinters (Esquirlas) by Natalia Gayaralde, Argentina (tie).
- est U.S. Latinx Film: Landfall by Cecilia Aldarondo and Through the Night by Loira Limbal (tie).
For more information please visit: https://www.cinematropical.com/awards12
Celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2021, 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 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. 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.
