- FICValdivia will take place between October 7 and 13.
- In this version of the Festival: 6 competitions, conferences, music, and a comprehensive sample of all-time classics, and the most compelling in contemporary cinema.
With the attendance of important authorities and personalities from the cultural and political circles in Valdivia and the Los Ríos Region, the official launch of the 26th Valdivia International Film Festival was held this last Tuesday September 24. FICValdivia will take place this coming October 7 to the 13.
In the main campus at Universidad Austral de Chile, festival director Raúl Camargo, along with Antonio Ruiz-Tagle, president of the Valdivia Cultural Center for Film Promotion, announced some of the most relevant news in this 2019 edition. Present at the event were Los Ríos regional intendant César Asenjo, UACh Chancellor, Doctor Óscar Galindo, and the Los Ríos Regional Ministry Secretary for Culture, Helmuth Palma, together with other authorities, where the festival poster was presented, along with this year’s commercial spot, which makes reference to the 60th anniversary of the fateful 1960 earthquake in Valdivia. That occurrence left a tragic toll, but also demonstrated the human capacity to overcome and work together to accomplish a common goal.
Remembering this milestone, FICValdivia 2019 wants to emphasize that cinema is a collective endeavor, the result of many players’ effort and passion – those that make and produce films; those that finance and distribute them; the authorities and institutions that believe that culture has a central role in our society and in human fulfillment; the programmers and critics; and of course the audiences that watch, listen to, experience, and dream about these movies.
In order for this collective vision to carry on, FICValdivia persists in our tireless mission to appeal to progressively larger audiences, and to solidify our ties to the community.
2019 News
Among the highlights for this year, and thanks to a contribution from the Los Ríos Regional Government, FICValdivia 26 resumes one of its most cherished activities by the community: Cinemás, the outdoor series of cinema and music that has always been celebrated by Valdivian audiences. The musical guests this time are more than up to the task of this relaunching, including singer-songwriter Camila Moreno, who is in the peak of her career, and popular bands Lucybell and Tomo Como Rey, that will liven the evenings in Valdivia, between Wednesday October 9, and Friday October 11.
Along with this, the reopening of Teatro Cervantes will allow to relocate some FICValdivia activities to this renovated space, contributing to reanimate this representative city landmark. Among them, and thanks to an alliance with Asociación de Músicos de Rock Valdivia (Valdivia Rock Musicians Association), who are celebrating their 20th anniversary, three classic films from the silent period will be set to live music.
Faithful to their vocation for interpreting society and providing a space to air their present desires and convictions, FICValdivia 2019 rekindles the spirit of its beginnings – that Valdivia Ecological Cinema-Video event that was born in 1994 – introducing a new series devoted to environmental cinema, and whose name is explicit, in terms of its motivation: Urgent.
FICValdivia is full of cinematographic discoveries and scoops that will even surprise adept cinephiles, with countless Chilean, Latin American, and World premieres, in each one of its sections, including the latest movies by the great authors in contemporary cinema, such as João Nicolau, Nadav Lapid, Angela Schanelec, Federico Veiroj, Damien Manivel, Corneliu Porumboiu, Martín Rejtman, Nicolás Pereda, Deborah Stratman, Ben Rivers, Kevin Jerome Everson, Teddy Williams, Abbas Fahdel, José Luis Torres Leiva, Ignacio Agüero, Alejandro Fernández, and many more.
FICValdivia also pays tribute to some of the greatest filmmakers in movie history, in its Homage section: Agnès Varda, Sara Gómez, and Adolfas Mekas. This series will also feature a special program of Valdivian short films, the experimental videos that won the Juan Downey Contest at the BAM Media Arts Biennial, the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the film Eloy, and the 60 years since the 1960 earthquake, with the documentary La Respuesta. We will also celebrate two cinematographic territories: the history of Spanish black comedy (thanks to the support of Acción Cultural Española ACE), and the thematic diversity in contemporary French cinema, with the ACID program (thanks to a contribution by Institut Française Chile).
However, the festival does not lose sight of its mass audiences and family moviegoers, and its program includes a broad sample appealing to the general public, young audiences, children, and local spectators. FICValdivia offers free admittance to its sections Youth’s Feature Competition, Latin American Children’s Short Film Competition, Homage, Retrospective Program, First Nations, Urgent, Nocturama, Pásate una Película, and Cinemás.
The Program and latest announcement regarding our Official Selection
You can find the complete 2019 FICValdivia program on our website, including all the competing films in the Official International Feature Selection, the Official Chilean Feature Selection, the Official International Youth’s Feature Selection, the Official Latin American Short Film Selection, and the Official Latin American Children’s Short Film Selection.
There is still time – until October 1 – to get your Festival Pass, and watch all the films in FICValdivia’s new edition, at preferred rates.
