समाचार

One of the most alluring aspects of the Morelia Film Festival is its diverse programming: not just promoting new Mexican and Michoacan filmmaking, and sampling the best of new worldwide films, those destined for both the arthouse and commercial venues, but creating a new generation of cinephiles, as well as pleasing those already converted, with its rediscoveries of the past.  Luckily on day one I stumbled into an astonishing 1952 flamenco documentary by the cineaste audit Edgar Neville, which festival director Daniela Michel told me was due to their relationship with the Filmoteca Espanola, source of her major rediscovery of last year, Manuel Mur Oti. But the tribute to Neville, as fascinating as he sounds in the catalogue essay (friend of Chaplin, supervisor of Hispanic versions of early American sound films, director of twenty films in Franco's Spain), only includes one other film, "Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks," in an unsubtitled print.