37th edition

The 37th edition of Cinélatino, Rencontres de Toulouse, festival of Latin American cinema, will be held from March 21 to 30, 2025 in Toulouse and throughout the month of March in Occitanie.

Competitions, discoveries, revivals, focus, features, shorts, fiction, documentaries and a special selection for young audiences will make up the sections of the 130 films on the program.

This year, the focus will be on two artists who are shaking up ideas: Algerian-Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz and Argentinian filmmaker Albertina Carri, who will be present, and the “Miradas y voces indígenas*”, with the presentation of recent films by filmmakers from Latin America’s native peoples.

We know that our audiences are curious and generous. The 37th edition of the festival will encourage encounters, discussions and sharing, both in the cinemas and in our Barrio Latino (festival village), which will take shape in the courtyard of the ENSAV-CROUS, due to the closure of La Cinémathèque de Toulouse for renovations.

The full festival program will be available at the end of February 2025.

KARIM AÏNOUZ

Karim Aïnouz is an audacious filmmaker. After a fruitful period of experimental short films in the 1990s, he made his first feature-length film, Madame Satã, in 2002, in which he portrays a character of the night, transvestite, thief, artist, father… His cinema has subsequently consistently offered poetic and courageous visibility to people marginalized because of their gender, skin color or sexual identity. His strength lies in visual invention. This filmmaker of métissage mixes documentary and poetry, Brazil, Germany and Algeria, personal memory and collective action. He wants to “fill the gaps” in a cinema that so often ignores women, minorities and homosexuals.
Karim Aïnouz gives “a face to the faceless past, as if […] (he had) a mission to tell stories that have been obscured.” (Interview given to Exitmag, April 17, 2024).

Cinélatino is keen to ensure that all his feature films, one of which was co-directed with Marcelo Gomes, can be seen in Toulouse in March 2025. As Cinélatino’s guest of honor, he will share with audiences his commitment to the struggle against all forms of power.

A section in partnership with La Cinémathèque de Toulouse.

ALBERTINA CARRI

Albertina Carri is a troublemaker, an outsider. Her distinctive personality shakes up conventions, using the most original cinematographic resources, demonstrating that the country has an image to defend against all odds.

After starting out as an assistant director in the 1990s, she burst onto the national scene in 2001 with two short films, including a pornographic animation about the Barbie doll.
In 2012, Cinélatino showcased the richness and radicalism of her short films. Her feature-length work, reunited this year, is vast and eclectic. In it, she delves into her childhood as the daughter of the disappeared, peasant life, dark stories of family and fortune, and nods to porn, film noir or road movies tinged with humor. His aesthetic research is demanding, from sumptuous colors to carefully grained B&W. His filmic quest is manifold, from documentary to fiction, from archives to the most unexpected invention. His films, whether joyful or terrible, interest and enthrall.

In today’s Argentina, deprived of its film institute by absurd and destructive measures, where cinema is struggling to survive, his work and visibility are more than salutary.

MIRADAS Y VOCES INDÍGENAS

For over five hundred years, from Mexico to Patagonia, indigenous peoples have resisted the policies of destruction, discrimination and marginalization practiced by colonial powers. Defending their existence as social groups and seeking authentic visibility and representation has led them to seize communication technologies through self-representation. The most recent works offer a glimpse of how far we’ve come in using cinema as a tool to narrate their own experience, revitalize their identity and curb dominant discourses. It perpetuates the heritage of orality and preserves the historical roots of each people. We hear the multiple languages (556 different languages, 38.4% of which are in danger of disappearing) of an America that, as it happens, is not Latin. These films counteract images that are too often folklorized and stereotyped, and bear witness to the cultures of communities and their struggles.