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Chilean actress Antonia Zegers, whose notable credits include several of Pablo Larraín’s films, including “Tony Manero,” “The Club,” “No,” and his Pinochet-as-Dracula pic, “The Count,” has boarded the upcoming drama “The Comeback” (“El Regreso”) by Peru’s Joanna Lombardi.

Zegers, who also toplined Lucia Puenzo’s lauded series “The Pack” (“La Jauria”), Marcela Said’s “Los Perros” and Belén Funes’ “The Exiles,” serves as a juror at the Ibero-American Fiction section of the ongoing 40th Guadalajara Film Festival (Ficg), wrapping on June 14.

“What first drew me in was the chance to work with Joanna – there’s a quiet strength in her, a way of seeing the world that speaks to me. I trust that together, we’ll create something truly special,” she told Variety.

Lombardi is a former creative executive for Movistar in Latin America and leading Peruvian shingle Tondero Films. Her directorial feature debut “Casadentro” won Montreal Festival...

Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin American literature’s modern greats, died April 13 in Lima, Peru. He was 89.

He died surrounded by his family and “at peace,” his children Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa announced in a social post.

“He enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him,” they added.

That body of work is huge. Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, Vargas Llosa was also with once close friend Gabriel García Márquez, the towering star of the Latin American Boom, which brought to global attention the works of young Latin American writers – Peru’s Vargas Llosa, Colombia García Márquez, Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes, Argentina’s Julio Cortázar and Cuba’s Guillermo Cabrera Infante – which were among the first Latin American novelists to be published in Europe.

Combining a large influence of European modernism, William Faulkner, experiment and word play,...

U.K. based sales agency Film Republic has picked up Peru’s 2024 Oscar entry “The Erection of Toribio Bardelli,” the latest film from Adrián Saba, one of Peru’s most prominent auteurs on the festival scene.

Film Republic has also shared a first international trailer with Variety. The film screens this week in Los Angeles at the GuadaLAjara Film Festival LA, which runs Nov. 1-3. V&r Films distributes in Peru, Livres Distribution in Brazil.

Set in central Lima, “The Erection of Toribio Bardelli” captures the Bardelli family in deep grief at the death of the wife and mother, Toribio Bardelli, the father suffering erectile dysfunction.

Feeling out of place in a current world, clinging to old world values such as virility but, as captured in a first scene in a brothel, Toribio can’t even get it up.

He mourns the death of his wife, can’t get over...

The upcoming ViX Plus romantic drama series “Travesuras de la Niña Mala” (“Bad Girl”), an adaptation of the 2006 novel by Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, has found its heroine.

Macarena Achaga, who most recently starred in HBO Max’s “Father of the Bride,” will play Arlette, a non-conformist who urges her lover to break away from his routine and be more adventurous. Their lives will intersect over forty years across Lima, Paris, Madrid, Tokyo, London and other cities.

“‘The ‘Bad Girl’ invites us to challenge our life in auto pilot, transform ourselves and take charge of who we want to be, and seek happiness while feeling immortal because what is life without those moments when we forget that everything has an end?” the synopsis goes.

“’Travesuras de la Niña Mala’ proves that my purpose of seeking equity and the projection of our female voices attracts characters ready for anything,...

The 4th Iff Panama’s Primera Mirada pix-in-post sidebar has selected five features – from Cuba, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Panama – and an omnibus film, “Dias de Luz” (Days of Light), produced by six Central American countries.

The number of films submitted to the Central America and Caribbean sidebar has risen by almost 50% this year – 32 films were submitted in 2015, 46 in 2016, 48 in 2017 and 67 this year.

Sales agents attending the work-in-progress creenings – which run April 9-10 – include FiGa Films, Habanero Film Sales, Weisner Distribution, the Havana Film Festival, Berlinale and OpenReel.

Projects will be screened in exclusive private sessions for sales agents, distributors, and film festival programmers. The jury members are Mexican producer, Laura Imperiale, Panamanian writer, Daniel Domínguez Z., and veteran Peruvian director, Francisco J. Lombardi.

The sidebar is particularly important for the region’s filmmakers who often desperately require post-production completion finance and mentoring advice. Three out of last year’s...

Peruvian director Francisco J. Lombardi has worked steadily since the late 70s, having made 18 films; not a small feat in a country where making movies is a difficult task. The Lima Film Festival is one of the longest running fests in Peru, debuting its 19th edition this past week. It makes sense that they would choose Lombardi's 19th directorial outing as their Opening Night film.Dos Besos (Two Kisses in English) is, on the surface, a romantic melodrama which follows the expected blueprint. Looks can be deceiving, however; it stil has a few surprises up its sleeve.Formerly titled Troika (and having nothing to do with Russians), this is the story of your everyday love triangle: Paola (Wendy Vásquez) a successful television producer, discovers that her...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

After nine days, with over 300 films being screened and various other activities, the Lima Film Festival ended its 18th birthday in style, with a grand ceremony held at the city's National Theatre.The night kicked off with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Peruvian filmmaker Francisco J. Lombardi, arguably one of the most important directors in the country. His career spans over 18 films, many of them classics of Peruvian cinema: among them, 1988's La Boca del Lobo ("The Lion's Den"), one of the best movies ever made about the country's "inner war" with the Shining Path terrorist group; 1996's film noir-influenced Bajo La Piel ("Under The Skin"); and 2000's Tinta Roja ("Red Ink") adapted from Chilean author Alberto Fuguet's novel of the same name.Love him...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, 74, not American Cormac McCarthy or Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong'o or the Swede Tomas Tranströmer as some had predicted, will be handed the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature next December. As per the Swedish-based Academy, Vargas Llosa was awarded "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." Among the handful of movies based on Vargas Llosa's novels are Francisco J. Lombardi's Peruvian drama La ciudad y los perros (1985, lit. "The City and the Dogs"), about four cadets at a military academy; Jon Amiel's comedy Tune in Tomorrow… (1990), based on Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and starring Barbara Hershey, Peter Falk and Keanu Reeves; and Luis Llosa's Anglo-Spanish La fiesta del chivo / The Feast of the Goat (2005), in which a woman (Isabella Rossellini) remembers her family's relationship with Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo [...]...

Chicago – Just two weeks after the European Union Film Festival concluded at the Gene Siskel Film Center, another excellent international showcase of world cinema began in the Windy City. The 26th Chicago Latino Film Festival screens over 120 films during its two-week run, highlighting Latino filmmakers and cultures from Latin America, Portugal, Spain and the United States.

The festival is presented by the International Latino Cultural Center, in cooperation with Columbia College Chicago, and runs from Friday, April 16th to Thursday, April 29th. It kicked off last Friday with an Opening Night Gala in the form of a Mexican fiesta, commemorating Mexico’s Bicentennial Independence and Centennial Revolution Anniversary. “Round Trip,” the winner at last year’s Guadalajara Mexican Film Festival, was screened, and its director, Gerardo Tort, was in attendance. Yet there are plenty more first-class festival events in store for moviegoers during this upcoming week.

On Friday, April 23rd,...