New York, NY – The winners of the 2nd annual edition of the Cinema Tropical AWARDS presented by Cinelatino and Dish LATINO, were unveiled this evening at a special event at The New York Times’ 15th Floor Conference Center. Peruvian film Octubre / October by Daniel and Diego Vega was the winner of the award for Best Feature Film of the Year, whilst Chilean film Nostalgia de la luz / Nostalgia for the Light by Patricio Guzmán was named Best Documentary Film. Mexican film El lugar más pequeño / The Tiniest Place by Tatiana Huezo won two awards for Best First Film and Best Director, Documentary Film; and Michael Rowe, also from Mexico, was awarded as Best Director, Feature Film for Año bisiesto / Leap Year.
October, the Vega brother’s debut feature film was the Jury Prize winner at the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival 2010, and has been selected to represent Peru in the upcoming Academy Awards in the Foreign Language Film category. The film tells the story of a shabby pawnbroker whose life drastically changes when an infant is abandoned in his bed.
Denisse Oller, Executive Director of the Joseph A. Unanue Latino Institute at Seton Hall University, served as MC for the evening, that featured filmmakers Ciro Guerra from Colombia and Julia Solomonoff from Argentina as special awards presenters, as well as Assistant Curator Sally Berger from The Museum of Modern Art. In his remarks, Cinema Tropical’s director Carlos A. Gutiérrez said that “the array of films of this year at the Cinema Tropical AWARDS represented a wide range of aesthetic and narrative diversity, and the selection process was very competitive.”
The non-profit media arts organization Cinema Tropical also announced that the audience will have the chance to see the four award-winning films once again as they will be showcased in a special series to take place on January 21 and 22, 2012 at 92YTribeca in New York City, followed by other venues in cities around the country throughout next year.
The winners of this year’s Cinema Tropical AWARDS were selected by a jury panel composed by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, The Museum of Modern Art; Nicolás Entel, filmmaker; Marcela Goglio, Programmer, Latinbeat, The Film Society of Lincoln Center; Jerónimo Rodríguez, film critic, NY1 News/Noticias; Paul Julian Smith, FBA, film scholar and critic, CUNY Graduate Center; and Mauricio Zacharias, screenwriter. The films were selected from a list of Latin American feature films with a minimum of 60 minutes in length that were premiered between January 1, 2010 and March 31, 2011.
The Cinema Tropical AWARDS are presented by Cinelatino and Dish LATINO and sponsored by The Lift. The Cinema Tropical AWARDS are presented in partnership with VOCES, the Latino Heritage Network of The New York Times Company; 92YTribeca; Festival Scope; and Tóxico Cultura. Special thanks to Andrew Vargas-Stehney, Amber Shields, Mara Behrens, Mario Díaz and Lucila Moctezuma.