Miami splice.

• Author: Malone, Michael
• Position: Miami Film Festival - Film

For Nat Chediak, Mr. Miami Film Festival, it's a matter of taste, a question of flavors. Some people prefer chocolate, some vanilla. Some Cannes, some Berlin. Others like Toronto, or Tokyo. What the U.S. film industry has come to recognize, what filmmakers from Mexico City to Madrid have come to court, and what Spanish-language film buffs have come to savor at the Miami Film Festival are not vanilla and chocolate but guava, papaya, and mango--as well as other saucy and original flavors--that Chediak serves up each year.

Running February 3-12, the Miami Film Festival, now in its twelfth year, is touted as the international festival to preview the best of Spanish-language cinema. Miami's stock soared when last year's opening film, Belle Epoque, a mucous romance by Spain's Fernando Trueba, earned the Oscar for "Best Foreign-Language Film," and the festival's closer, Kika, earned its brash and eccentric Spanish director, Pedro Almodovar, further U.S. accolades and box-office success.

If Cannes is the supermarket bonanza of the film industry, Miami is its gourmet deli. With some twenty-six to twenty-eight films viewed over a two-week span, Miami offers no statuettes, no bickering juries, no poll-ticking over "Best Film." Instead, plenty of fanfare, late-night toasting over aguardiente and steamy Cuban coffee, and some of the most creative film found anywhere on the globe.

At publication tame, films selected as likely candidates for this year's festival included Sin compasion, by Francisco Lombardi of Peru, La reina de la noche, by the Mexican Arturo Ripstein, and Los peores anos de nuestra vida, by Spain's Emilio Martinez Lazaro.

All films are shown in the Gusman Center of the Performing Arts, a magnificently restored eighteen-hundred-seat theater resembling an Andalusian palace with Moorish-styled balconies and turrets, all flamed under a starlit "sky" of twinkling electric lights and painted clouds. The theater, originally built by Paramount in 1926 to show silent movies, stands at the epicenter of Miami's downtown, on Flagler Street, amid the bevy of electronics stores and corner cafetereas.

The chance to follow Belle Epoque to Hollywood and a possible Oscar has undoubtedly made the Miami Film Festival a temptress with increasing allure for Latin American and international filmmakers world-wide. "We take great pride in having introduced people like Almodovar (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, Kika) and Trueba...