The Americas Film Festival.

• Author: Mosier, John
• Position: Part 2

We now think of film festivals as glamorous marketplaces, but originally they were more like exhibits of paintings in a museum or art gallery. The intention was to let people sample what was newest and most interesting in the film world, with an emphasis on high artistic quality. As the world of film festivals developed after 1945, however, glamor and commerce became the dominant idols of the film world, and the original festival ideal of artistic exhibition went into a more or less permanent eclipse.

But in the 1960s there was a revival of original film festival aims. First, there were film weeks--exhibitions of films that travelled around the globe introducing audiences to the latest productions. The term, derived from the famous Critics Week organized by the Association of French Film Critics, simply describes an exhibition of from eight to fifteen new films, all chosen for their artistic value and for their contribution to our understanding of the cinema as an art form. Argentina, Brazil and Mexico all came to rely upon film weeks as a means of introducing audiences from New Delhi to New Orleans to the best of their films.

At the same time, there was a surge of interest in film festivals on a grander scale, with no buying and selling, and with no prizes. In the late 1970s the largest and most successful of these was the Los Angeles International Film Exposition (FILMEX), which introduced North American audiences to some of the best films from Latin America.

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. By the end of the 1970s, festival entities like FILMEX had to cut back, and in many cases, were forced to become more conventional. Film weeks likewise suffered. In Latin America, filmmakers became the victims of their own success. As their films achieved better penetration of foreign markes, there was some inevitable decentralization, which made it harder to put together packages of films for exhibitions. Decentralization also meant that there was no one organization in any country with the means to ship a large bulk package of motion pictures around the world, or even to locate the potential exhibitors for such a package.

Ironically, then, as Latin American films began to have some degree of market penetration in Europe and North America, audiences found good films ever more difficult to see. Enter dynamic Brazilian cineast, Glaucia Baena Soares, who, with the support of the Organization of American States, has established the Americas...