“CortoCircuito/Short Cuts,” the Latino Short Film Festival of New York, will be presented at New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (located at 53 Washington Square South) October 19-21. Programmer Diana Vargas will offer audiences highly acclaimed and controversial Latin American and Spanish shorts produced in the last decade. All films are English-subtitled and are free and open to the public. For further information, call 212.998.3650 or visit www.nyu.edu/kjc/cortocircuito.
Over 50 films will be screened, from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Spain, Uruguay, and the U.S. The festival opens on Thursday, October 19, at 7p.m., with a two-part program. In By Hand and Machine, Latin American animation will be showcased. The second part of the October 19 program, ‘Un Chin’ of Everything, features award-winning short films in fiction and documentary as well as some experimental works that resist easy classification.
On Friday, October 20, at 7 p.m. the program entitled Ugly, Perverse, and Not So Naïve presents an unsettling collection of thriller and suspense shorts.
The Saturday, October 21 program begins at 2 p.m. with “kid”-protagonists highlighted in a selection entitled Kid-tested: Not as Sweet as a Lollipop - short films with cruelty and discovery as serious childhood matters. This is followed at 4 p.m. by History Remembered in Short Term in which history is shown to mean more to those who experience it than to those who chronicle it.
The festival culminates at 5:30 p.m. with Generation Next in which special director introductions enhance shorts selected from an open-call of 130 submissions; and by Love: Without an End There is No Means, stories of encounters, disencounters, stealthy romances, and impossible loves.
“CortoCircuito might represent the cynicism of a new generation of filmmakers, or it might simply represent the attitudes of the countries they live in, but one thing is for sure, the program offers a way to view how the short form, as a genre, regenerates cinema itself and is not just a medium to showcase young directors’ technical skills,” said Vargas, CortoCircuito’s founder.