What to watch at ¡Viva! 2018, the UK’s biggest Spanish & Latin American festival
Cuban cinema and films of a revolutionary spirit are among the highlights of ¡Viva!, Manchester’s annual celebration of Spanish and Latin American culture.
For more than two decades, ¡Viva! has been a vital addition to Manchester’s cultural calendar. The festival began in 1995 at the city’s much-loved (and now departed) Cornerhouse as a celebration of Spanish film. Its inception coincided with the mid-90s boom for that nation’s cinema, with filmmakers such as Alejandro Amenábar, Julio Medem and Icíar Bollaín all emerging around the same period, while more established names like Bigas Luna and Pedro Almodóvar were fresh from international breakthroughs. ¡Viva! provided a platform for this rich pool of work, the majority of which wasn’t destined for general release in UK theatres.
In the years since, ¡Viva! has expanded to include films from Latin America, and now that it’s moved to Manchester’s venerable new multi-arts hub HOME, ¡Viva! has grown to incorporate visual art and theatre too. Cinema remains its beating heart, however, with the festival returning this month (12 April to 5 May) for its 24th edition, with a lively programme that includes 23 feature films.
The festival’s first weekend is dedicated to Cuba, with opening film Candelaria taking audiences back to 1994, when the country was experiencing dire economic conditions and a strict trading embargo in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The focus of Jhonny Hendrix Hinestroza’s film is a septuagenarian couple whose passion for one another is rejuvenated during this ‘special period’ when they find themselves in possession of a forbidden object of capitalist excess: a camcorder. Reports from last year’s Venice Film Festival, where Candelaria won the Venice Days Award, suggest Hinestroza’s film delivers an amusing but ultimately moving take on sexual passion in old age.
Playing the same turbulent period of Cuban history for laughs is Ernesto Daranas’s Sergio & Sergei, which concerns the unlikely friendship that strikes up between a Cuban ham radio enthusiast and a Russian cosmonaut who’s stranded on the Mir space station following the chaotic dismantling of the Soviet Union. Remarkably, it’s based on a true story.
The jewel of this mini Cuban celebration is the screening of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s formally audacious Memories of Underdevelopment, from 1968. The first major feature from Castro’s Cuba to receive international distribution, it follows a young man paralysed by an existential crisis as the people closest to him flee to the US in the wake of Castro’s rise to power. The Cuban strand includes a toe-tapper, too, in the form of Wim Wenders’ joyful concert movie Buena Vista Social Club (1999).
In the 50th anniversary of May 68, ¡Viva!’s programme also highlights the similarly revolutionary spirit of Latin America. No film better sets this tone than Argentinean documentary The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas’s impassioned epic that’s as stylistically radical as its politics. Cinemagoers of a revolutionary inclination should also catch Canoa: A Shameful Memory, from 1976 but set in ‘68. Felipe Cazals’ white-hot docudrama reimagines the real-life lynching of five young university workers who are mistaken for communist agitators by residents of the Mexican village of San Miguel Canoa.
More contemporary film highlights include Abracadabra, an Almodóvar-esque comedy from Spanish filmmaker Pablo Berger; Yanillys Pérez’s docudrama Jeffrey, following a young lad from the Dominican Republic with dreams of rescuing his family from poverty by becoming a Reggaeton singer; multi-stranded Ecuadorian thriller Such Is Life in the Tropics, which the Hollywood Reporter called “nuanced and lacerating”; Jonatan Relayze’s Rosa Chumbe, a bruising study of a female police officer in Lima, Peru, who’s struggling with alcoholism; and The Bar, the latest abrasive comedy from Spanish auteur Alex de la Iglesia, whose colourful career will be put under the spotlight in a ¡Viva! talk from University of Salford’s Andy Willis.
Another must-see looks to be Catalan director Carla Simón’s Summer 1993, a vivid portrait of childhood loss that won Simón the best first feature prize at last year’s Berlinale. Juan Sebastián Mesa’s The Nobodies, meanwhile, is a dreamy and affectionate portrait of a few days in the lives of some directionless millennials in Medellín, Colombia. It won Mesa the Venice Critics’ Week prize in 2016.
In addition to the films, theatre and visual art on offer, what’s so winning about ¡Viva! is the way the festival completely inhabits its venue’s space, transforming its decor, ambience and even its restaurant’s menu. For 24 days, HOME will become a warm and welcoming riot of colour and music as Manchester forgets the rain and embraces the fiesta spirit.
