Shorts set.

Sao Paulo International Festival of Short Films Sao Paulo Museum of Image and Sound Sao Paulo, Brazil August 18-28

Standing before a packed audience that had come to Sao Paulo's Museum of Image and Sound to pay him tribute, 75-year-old Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez said, "I feel that I am standing here, looking at the future of cinema in Latin America. It's you." Applause rose as a spiritual godfather of the Latin American short film symbolically passed the baton to the dozens of young directors who were guests at Sao Paulo's International Festival of Short Films. They may treat Alvarez with affection, but the work of the emerging generation does not embrace the anti-Hollywood stance or radical politics of its predecessors. Though many were unspooling their first works, they stalked the halls of the Museum with the swagger of seasoned independents in search of a backer.

If the box office success of Alfonso Arau's Like Water for Chocolate (Mexico, 1992), Tomas Gutierrez Alea's Strawberries and Chocolate (Cuba, 1993), Maria Novaro's Danzon (Mexico, 1991) and the rags to riches tale of Robert (El Mariachi, 1992) Rodriguez have drawn Hollywood's attention to the commercial potential of Latino production, they have also rekindled hopes among directors south of the border of crossing over into the American market. The Sundance Institute's attention to Latin American cinema in the past decade and the extension of Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundation support to independent producers in the region has also boosted many cineaste's hopes, not to mention how it has affected their choice of subject matter. And while European television resources and venues (such as the now defunct Channel 4 series "South") have played an important role, directors still maintain the goal of showing their films in theaters, not on television screens.

The filmmakers' optimism about America, however, clouds the reality that circulation of Latin American films remains as difficult as it ever was, and that national industries that once had a very strong feature film output, such as Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba, have lurched almost completely to a halt. Keeping these difficulties in mind, there is one area of filmmaking that has been enjoying a remarkable upsurge in the region in recent years--the short film. Sao Paulo's festival, now in its fifth year, is an excellent showcase for this genre. The 1994 event included 280 films, 82 of which were from Brazil, 30 from other Latin American countries. The festival also hosted half a dozen international programs of the finest shorts culled from several European festivals, tributes to Alvarez and to the Brazilian Aardman Animation Studios, and an evening of works by the extraordinarily talented young British director Simon Pummell.

Hardly granted attention at many other Latin American festivals, the short, as Columbian curator and film critic Enrique Ortiga notes, actually constitutes the overwhelming majority of film production throughout the history of Latin American Cinema. Some of that history was featured in the recent American Federation for the Arts touring program "Short Films from Latin America" but it consisted mostly of social interest documentaries from the '60s and '70s, leaving out many other earlier tendencies and completely ignoring the recent wave, consisting mainly of narrative fiction. In Latin America, it is only in recent years that the short film has been gaining recognition. Due to the decrease in feature production, the increase of film schools throughout the region, and the international recognition of leading young directors, the festivals highlighting them, such as those in Gramado, Caracas, and Sao Paulo, have moved to the forefront as prime showcases that capture the current energy in Latin American cinema. This wave has been so significant in Brazil that curator and film historian Joao Luiz Vieira is preparing a book about the short film renaissance of the past decade.

Though it is commonplace to generalize about a "Latin American Cinema," it is evident from the festival program that few countries in the region actually sustain a support system that permits high levels of production. Brazilian filmmaking is centered in Sao Paulo, for example, where the local goverment confers a dozen grants for short film production per year. The Mexican Film Institute, IMCINE, has redoubled its attention to short film production, since the feature film mini-renaissance of recent years has proven less economically viable than had been hoped. The state-sponsored film institutes of Venezuela and Argentina, though extremely precarious, do offer some support. The Chilean government has recently instituted funding to directors of short films, who have formed a coalition to administer the monies. However, whereas it was once the case that state-sponsored film institutes were the only source of support, one must now take into account the fact that burgeoning advertising industries in several countries have inadvertently become training grounds for many new filmmakers, and also provide income and equipment to many young independents. This is the case in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile predominantly, but also holds for Puerto Rico and Venezuela. The prevalence of advertising explains to a certain degree the heightened concern for technical perfection that characterizes the current wave.

All these factors contribute to making the filmmaking of the new generation quite different in style and spirit. The festival selection is marked by a preponderance of psychologically-oriented narratives and twisted romances that focus on the fantasy lives of the urban middle classes. This tendency yields good results in the case of the Mexican films, but weak ones in the case of the Chilean shorts, many of which seem mired in pseudo-intellectual introspection. Throughout the week, in panel discussions and private conversations, the cineastes claimed the right to show a side of life that had little to do with regionalisms or social ills, often in reaction to the expectations implicit in questions put to them by European and American visitors. They frequently invoked somewhat rigid views of "political" films of previous decades in order to distinguish themselves from that past. While I respect and acknowledge their right not to cater to foreigners' desires for films that conform to prevailing stereotypes, it was not difficult to see how such justifications could easily become facile excuses masking an absence of social vision.

Whatever their views of what they oppose, the influence of earlier established paradigms such as the tradition of parodic humor, and the adaptation of magic realist literature and historical narratives continually resurface in the films. Many of the stronger pieces manage to address social problems with a refreshing lack of didacticism. Mexico made an impressive, if stylistically conventional showing within the festival panorama. The IMCINE films are consistently marked by tight scripts, solid directions, and expressionistic use of lighting. Thematically, they adhere to familiar terrain--the darker side of the capital city's bourgeoisie--but each story contains an ironic twist that reveals the repressed anger and urban angst that simmer beneath the respectable veneer of the Mexican middle class.

In Javier Borges Peor es Nada (Better Than Nothing, 1994), an advertising executive and his painter wife are growing apart, until she begins to receive obscene phone calls that spark erotic fantasies and put some excitement back into the couple's sex life. In the end, it is revealed that it is her husband who is arranging the calls. Cita en el Paraiso (A Date in Heaven, 1992), by Moises Ortiz Urquidi, begins with a prim-looking woman's anxious arrival at a cheap hotel for a secret rendezvous with her lover--who is actually her husband. Together, they relish their monthly escape from the routine of family duties. Carlos Carrera's beautifully rendered animation short, El Heroe (The Hero, 1993), awarded a Golden Palm at Cannes, features an awkward gentleman who notices a doe-eyed girl about to jump onto the tracks in a crowded Mexico City subway station. He saves her, only to be scolded by the girl, who succeeds in committing suicide on her second try while he is carted off by police.

Brazil also had many noteworthy films in the festival, though the overall selection was extremely uneven. Although film production is largely based in Sao Paulo, the legendary Casa de Cinema group in the southern city of Porto Alegre continues to generate some of the most exciting filmmaking in the country. The group's best known director, Jorge Furtado, whose 1989 short IIha das Flores (Island of Flowers) gained him international acclaim, screened his new film A Matadeira (The Killer, 1994) at the festival. One of the few films of the Latin American selection that dealt with both an historical subject and a topical social issue, the film draws a connection between massacres of innocents by the Brazilian army in the nineteenth century and the current killing of street children by police. Furtado conveys his characteristic biting irony through the studious artificiality of his historical recreations, startling juxtpositions, and the film's madcap narrator.

Another Casa de Cinema production premiere is Ana Luiza Acevedo's Ventre Livre (Free Womb, 1994), a highly engaging documentary about a subject too easy to pontificate about--women's health and reproductive rights in the world's most populated Catholic country. Acevedo manages to convey vital information with intelligence and good humor, playing off documentary conventions instead of being trapped by them. In addition, the outstanding editing skills of Casa de Cinema's Giba de Assis Brasil shine in this film.

Among the most interesting of the Sao Paulo-based productions is Jose Roberto Torero's Amor (Love, 1994), which unravels the saccharine style of promotional films and television romances through the tale of two childhood sweethearts who marry joyously, and then proceed to eat their way into grotesque obesity and eventually beat each other to death, And although the majority of the fiction shorts were rather straightforward in style, a striking first film by Lais Bodanzky, Cartao Vermelho (Red Card, 1994), broke away from the pack with freewheeling camerawork and fast-paced innovative editing. In the film, an adolescent tomboy's dreams of becoming a professional soccer player are rudely interrupted when the boys in her gang pin her against a wall to determine her sex.

One of the most memorable Latin American shorts from other countries was Argentine Fernando Diaz's Ruben, el Murcielago (Ruben, the Batman, 1993), the tale of a nerdy bodybuilder who thinks he's Batman. Blending wit and empathy for his pathetic protagonist, Diaz manages to transform body-building into a symbol of the hollowness of Portenos consumer-culture aspirations, and inadvertently poke fun at machismo.

Unfortunately, the American selection of short films at the festival was disappointing. Rather than demonstrating a range of independent styles, the selection was limited to safe choices such as Oscar nominees and movie stars' Darryl Hannah and Matthew Modine's forays into directing. It was a terrible shame, given the audience enthusiasm for and curiousity about American independent cinema. Museum director Amir Labaki and film curator and festival director Zita Carvalhosa are nonetheless continuing to look for ways to bring more interesting American programs to the museum. For example, concurrent with the festival, the institution is hosting video artist Bruce Yamamoto, who was creating an installation funded by a Wallace Foundation Fellowship. Problems aside, the festival is a rare instance of a film event in which shorts don't get lost in the shuffle. Packed audiences, excellent local press coverage, a gracious festival staff, and high-quality projection facilities demonstrate the institution's serious committment to supporting emerging independents in difficult times.

COCO FUSCO is currently a Mellon Fellow at the California Institute for the Arts. Her book Pura Bicultura is forthcoming from the New Press.