Zooming in at San Diego.

• Author: Werner, Louis
• Position: Brief Article

THE 2002 SAN DIEGO Latino Film Festival is set to begin on March 14, and festival director Ethan vat Thillo expects big crowds to see eighty films on three screens over a ten-day period. "Especially the Mexican films," says van Thillo, "which naturally are the favorite of our audience, 90 percent of whom are Mexican and Mexican-American."

Mexican films again this year are sure to be crowd pleasers: Y tu mama tambien [And Your Mother Too], an edgy teenage flick by Alfonso Cuaron, is the largest grossing Mexican production in Mexico ever, and Maria Navaro's Sin dejar huellas [Without a Trace], a road movie about two women on the run in Yucatan, puts a refreshing feminist twist on the archetypal buddy story. But films in Portuguese, English, and the street jive of East Los Angeles are just as likely to be on the program as movies with a Mexican accent.

The festival is now in its ninth year and to date has attracted thirty thousand people to see over four hundred films, everything from features newly released in theft home countries to experimental videos shot in downtown San Diego. "Our selection committee is always looking for something innovative," says van Thillo. "This region has so many other places to see mainstream Latino films, we can afford to focus on what is really new."

"What sets San Diego apart front the other Latino festivals," he continues, "is that we can program films without subtitles and not expect our audience to complain." And because the expensive, last-minute procedure of subtitling is usually less a priority for budget-strapped filmmakers than paying to get the print out of the color lab, the lack of subtitles has kept much of San Diego's best received work out of other festivals.

Ironically, what makes San Diego a great place for a Latino cultural event--its proximity to the border, its sophisticated audience--once made the festival's publicity job that much harder. Van Thillo remembers six years ago when only one journalist showed up for a pre-festival press conference in San Diego, but over forty attended the one he held across the border in Tijuana. The fact that the...