Cine Las Americas Daily Schedule: Friday

Apocalípsur is the story of El Flaco, who runs away to London because of threats against his mother. After a few months he comes back and finds that the city looks the same as when he left: the war continues and the bombs are still exploding. His best friends Caliche and Malala, together with Pipe, a handicapped drug addict, and La Comadreja, a loser, go to pick up El Flaco at the airport in their “Bola de Nieve”, a van in which they have rode many kilometers together and has become everyone’s refuge. Together, they flee to escape a city so dangerous it is referred to as Apocalípsur.

Javier Mejía O., a Social Communications major from the Pontificia Bolivarian University, has done various script writing and actor-direction courses and has directed several short films and documentaries. He participated in the third and fourth series of Muchachos a lo bien (Good Vibe Youngsters). He has directed many television series and also numerous commercials. He is currently working on the postproduction phase of a full-length documentary titled Vivir era mejor que la vida and the script for his next film Excursion.

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Madeinusa is a girl who lives in an isolated village in the Cordillera Blanca Mountain range of Peru. This strange place is characterized by its religious fervor from Good Friday at three o’clock in the afternoon (the time of day when Christ died on the cross) until Easter Sunday, in which the whole village can do whatever it feels like. During the two holy days, sin does not exist: God is dead and can’t see what is happening. Everything is accepted and allowed without remorse. Year after year, Madeinusa, her sister Chale, and her father Don Cayo—the Mayor and local big shot—maintain this tradition without question. Everything changes with the arrival of Salvador, a young geologist from Lima who will unknowingly change the young girl’s destiny.

Writer and director Claudia Llosa was born in Lima, Peru, in 1976. She holds a bachelor’s degree in filmmaking and a master’s degree in screenwriting from Madrid’s Escuela de Artes y Cine TAI. She also studied directing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Llosa attended the Sundance Screenwriters Lab with her script for Madeinusa, which went on to receive the Coral Award for best original screenplay at the International Festival of New Latin Cinema in Havana. She was awarded a grant from the Fundación Carolina y Casa de América, which funds the development of Iberoamerican film projects. In 2004 Llosa directed the short film Seeing Martina. Madeinusa is her feature debut.

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Producer Christian Liffers travels with his team to Cuba in search of evidence. In his luggage are poems and prose texts of the Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas—texts which describe the desire for love, sexual freedom and the proud and unbending attitude in the fight against discrimination. Are these desires and attitudes still to be found in Cuba? And which desires, clichés, and projections of Cuba attract the producer and many more people? Poems and prose texts are the reference points for the protagonists and their personal stories of present-day Cuba, which are always the center of attention. Six men with different backgrounds and of different ages describe their life, afflictions, desires, longings, and joys in Cuba. They have some things in common: homosexuality (with the exception of Isabel, the transsexual) and the daily social exclusion on the part of the Cuban “Machismo-society” and the Cuban government. However, they differ heavily concerning their social status and their opinions on the topic.

Christian Liffers studied theatre-direction in Hamburg and worked for several years as a director in German theatre. He has been working as a journalist for ten years and for the German television channel ZDF since 2001.

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