The 18th Annual International Latino Film Festival will be held March 1 – 3, at the Mill Creek Cinema in McKinleyville, from 6 – 10:20 p.m. This long-standing community event is a collaboration of College of the Redwoods Arts and Humanities Department and Humboldt State University’s Department of World Languages & Cultures.
Students and the general public are invited to watch three outstanding films relating to the theme “Arab Cultural Heritage in Spain:” Adiós Carmen (Mohamed Amin Benamraoui, 1982); Wilaya (Pedro Pérez Rosado, 2011), and Retorno a Hansala (Chus Gutiérrez, 2008). All films will be shown in Spanish, Arabic and Berber with English subtitles.
The festival is free for HSU students enrolled in SPAN 396 and CR students enrolled in SPAN 99A courses; entry is $5/film at the door. All proceeds will help fund the festival.
This year’s guest speaker is Karim Hauser Askalani, Head of Governance at Casa Árabe in Madrid, Spain. Each evening, Askalani will introduce the films and provide insight into the content and key social issues portrayed in the films. Following the screening, CR and HSU professors will share their impressions of the films, and, together with Askalani, they will engage the audience in a panel discussion in English. For academic credit, enrolled students will write an additional paper.
Askalani, who studied International Relations at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, is an expert in international relations, geo-politics and the media, and is a former BBC journalist in the Middle East
The mission of Casa Árabe is to analyze and accompany the socio-political transformations occurring in Arab countries through conferences, publications and diplomacy.
Before becoming Head of Governance, Askalani led the Casa Árabe Arab American program and edited the following Casa Árabe publications: Iraq en la encrucijada (otoño 2015), Sunníes y chiíes: lecturas políticas de una dicotomía religiosa (2014), Árabes en Norteamérica (2011), Contribuciones árabes a las identidades iberoamericanas (2009), and Los árabes en América Latina (2009, coedición con Siglo XXI). He was also a correspondent of BBC World News in the Middle East in Cairo between 2005 and 2008 and a journalist for the BBC World Service’s “Newshour” from 2003 to 2005, covering the invasion of Iraq. He has worked in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, and Oman.
The films for this year’s festival will be shown in the following order:
March 1: Adiós Carmen | Goodbye Carmen (Mohamed Amin Benamraoui, 1982)
In 1975, 10-year-old Amar lives in a village in northern Morocco with his violent uncle, waiting for the unlikely return of his mother, who has left for Belgium. He finds a friend in Carmen, his neighbor, who is a Spanish exile and who works as an usher at the village cinema. Carmen helps him discover a world previously unknown to him.
March 2: Wilaya | Tears of Sand (Pedro Pérez Rosado, 2011)
Fatimetu is a Sahrawi girl who returned for the burial of her mother to the Sahrawi refugee camps, after 16 years living in Spain. Her older brother Jatri announced to Fatimetu that her mother’s last wish was that she had inherited the familiar jaima (tent) and the responsibility of taking care of her sister Hayat, who is handicapped. Fatimetu accepted reluctantly the responsibility, as she barely can take care of herself. She bought an old pickup truck and finds work transporting goods between the camps (Wilayas), but Fatimetu is torn between life in the desert and the memories of her foster family and friends in Spain. Wilaya is the story of two sisters who come together after spending 16 years separated by two different cultures who will have to adapt to survive and find their own identities.
March 3: Retorno a Hansala | Return to Hansala (Chus Gutiérrez, 2008)
At the beginning of this decade the bodies of eleven young Moroccan immigrants who were trying to cross the Straight of Gibraltar appeared on the beaches of Rota, Spain. From their clothes, it was discovered that they all came from the same village, Hansala. The film portrays the event through the eyes of Martín, a funeral parlor owner who tries to make money from their deaths, and Leila, the sister of one of the dead boys. Together, they adventure into trying to repatriate the boy’s body by van and live an intense moral experience that will lead them to question their beliefs.
For more information on this event, please call the Humboldt State World Languages and Cultures Department at 707-826-3226.