The Festival de Málaga will create the 'America, America' section in 2026 to showcase the cultural diversity of the continent
The new proposal will highlight the cinematography of Latin America's native cultures
The new proposal will highlight the cinematography of Latin America's native cultures
In 2026, the Festival de Málaga will create America, America, a new section created with the aim of giving visibility to the ethnic reality of America, highlighting the identity roots and cultural diversity of its peoples and showcasing its filmmakers.
In addition to showing the recent work of filmmakers from indigenous peoples, the section will also highlight the forms of production that could be classified as "community" and which have been emerging in recent years with great strength and dynamism.
Juan Antonio Vigar presented the new section today at a working breakfast with members of the Conference of Audiovisual and Cinematographic Authorities of Ibero-America (CAACI), in which he stressed the Festival's willingness to increase collaboration and constant dialogue with the sector and to foster its usefulness for the industry. In order to further this line of work, he announced the creation of the new section.
The new proposal will have a maximum of four films, will be non-competitive and will enjoy respective cash prizes of 2,000 euros each, which will be given to their production companies to cover part of the production costs. In this way, the Festival joins others that already work for this cinema of identities, providing the films with a cash grant, as well as covering the travel and accommodation expenses of the director or producer of the films in Málaga, in order to encourage their participation in MAFIZ, the Festival's Industry area. The films will be selected by means of an open call for entries and by the audiovisual authorities of each country, who will be able to propose the titles they consider most interesting for the purpose of this project to the Festival. The final selection will be made by a committee appointed by the Festival.
This new showcase for Latin American cinema is yet another step forwards in the Festival de Málaga's involvement with the region's industry, which has positioned the Málaga event as a gateway to Europe for its films. The Festival's commitment to Latin America, which it made in 2017 when it scheduled Ibero-American films for the first time, is thus strengthened.
In addition, Vigar highlighted the two new lines of work that the Festival has started in 2025: the creation of Mercadoc.0 within the framework of Málaga Docs, an initiative based on the diagnosis of the demand for new formats by audiovisual operators and which is the first step towards building a new market; and the first edition of La Villa del Mar, which aims to become an ecosystem in which the industry and cutting-edge technology companies coexist with a practical component.
Afterwards, the legal advisor of CAACI's executive secretariat, Michel Salazar, presented CAACI's report on the cinema of indigenous peoples, in which he highlighted the importance of establishing a common framework on how to deal with ethnic issues.
Then, at the "Cinema of Identities in Latin America" round table, representatives of the film institutes of Honduras, Guatemala, Bolivia and Ecuador and the directors of the Mercosur Film Festival and Indiefest, all of them experts in films produced by these communities, debated the relevance of the audiovisual identity of the native peoples and how their cinema has for some time now become one of the main sources for reflecting the identity of these societies.
The climax of the day was the screening of the Peruvian film Kinra, by Marco Panatonic (2023), shot in Quechua, which won the Astor Piazzola Award for best feature film at the Mar del Plata Festival.
