Selected Projects of the Austral Industry Meetings 2011

The Black Heralds

ARGENTINA

Director: Micaela Tisminetzky
Producer: Ezequiel Pierri

A professional woman of fifty-seven, single, with no children, starts to become aware of her impending old age –and the solitude she has built around herself– through her visits to her mother, a resident at a geriatric home. As her observation of what surrounds her progresses, she begins to perceive that her destiny is close to those she comes in contact with daily, without anything to do but repeat a nonsensical routine, like the one she repeats every day in her own life.

Marilyn

ARGENTINA

Director: Martín Rodríguez
Producer: Paula Zyngierman

Marcelo, a teenager working in the fields outside of Buenos Aires, kills his mother and brother because he feels discriminated due to his sexuality. Inspired in a real events in 2009, without justifying or condemning, MARILYN narrates six days in the life of this family: Marcelo milks cows with his brother before dawn, sends messages in his mobile, and secretly dresses as a woman; worries over his sick father and watches TV with his mother; begins his sex life with the sons of the landowner, the same that torment him in the fields; commits murder.

Iron

CHILE

Director: Alejandro Fernández Almendras
Producer: Eduardo Villalobos

Mauricio Catalán (45) is a big company lawyer with a considerable fortune. An environmental NGO asks him to help a Mapuche community that knows there are rich iron deposits in their land, which will be exploited by a transnational. A young Mapuche dies in the conflict between both parties. Catalán has made him believe that a struggle to the ultimate consequences is the only solution. The lawyer will discover that nothing can be done in the face of corporate machinations.

Father and Daughter

CHILE

Director: Rodrigo Marín
Producer: Ana Perera

Emilio (39), a divorced architect, supervises construction of a tourist complex in a snowy forest in southern Chile. His daughter Antonia (16) is with him for a couple of days. While he works, she spends most of her time skiing, swimming naked in the heated pool, and writing in her diary. Emilio, wanting to know more about his daughter, secretly reads her diary, where she wrote she wanted to lose her virginity on this trip. Vicente (28), a ski instructor, organizes for them a trekking excursion into the mountain. This side trip is the beginning of her sex life, and of a real reunion between Father and Daughter.

Renzo

CHILE

Director: Juan Carlos Ponce 
Producer: Carlos Martínez

Renzo (17) lives in an isolated and forgotten rural area with scarce opportunities. He works in a slaughterhouse, and a coworker introduces him to bets in clandestine fights; there, he finds out his alcoholic brother Jaime (33) participates. He also discovers the link between the slaughterhouse owner and this illegal business, in which he gets a job. But, Jaime’s alcoholism has become an obstacle for his brother’s prospects. Renzo devises a plan so that a fighter seriously injures his brother, taking him out of the fighting ring for good. Thus, Renzo learns how to gain trust in a world on the fringes of legality.

Dirt on the Tongue

COLOMBIA

Director: Rubén Mendoza Moreno
Producer: Daniel García

If my grandfather would have asked me to kill him, I would have done it gladly, but he died first. Magical legend and terrible monster, not even his abduction conquered him. This is a hypothetical journey: he is ill and asks two grandchildren to kill him. Going from the Andes to the Colombian lowlands, his past emerges. Despite his pain, his grandkids resolve that killing him would be a gift, and so prolong his agony. This journey of hatred becomes deep, in tunnels of blood, nostalgia, disease; of impossible freedom when living next to such monsters.

All of Us

COSTA RICA

Director: Paz Fábrega
Producer: Kattia González

How a strange, improbable and fragile relationship between two girls begins: Monse (13) arrives where Nati (15) lives asking for food; Nati gives a kitten as a gift. They manage to find way to have fun around a boring San Juan neighborhood, with their respective pre-teen solitude and insecurities, until the fear of the city crosses their path.

Heights

MÉXICO

Director: Gabriel Nuncio
Producer: Laura Amelia Guzmán e Israel Cárdenas


Due to a tragedy, two sisters leave Monterrey, northern Mexico, in haste. Without being clear on what is going on, Miwi (16) drives a thousand kilometers to distance Ivanna (20), who is mysteriously implicated, away from the catastrophe. Although they grew up together, they have not spent much time together, and their forced pilgrimage creates a peculiar relationship between them, marked by love, pain and guilt.

Sand Dollars

MÉXICO

Director: Laura Amelia Guzmán / Israel Cárdenas
Producer: Aurora Dominicana

Jean Noël, a Frenchman of mature age, searches for Noelí among the wreckage of a Dominican town razed by a hurricane; little is left standing, and the environment questions whether to stay or leave. In Jean Noël’s memories remains the love for the young local with whom he had an ambiguous relationship based on money, deceit and paternity.

Sultan

PANAMÁ

Director: Enrique Castro
Producer: María Neyla Santamaría



Ten years after the brutal US invasion of Panama, ten days before the US peacefully reverts control of the Canal to Panama, and in the span of 24 hours, the lives of a tormented old lady, a shoeshine boy, a beautiful hermit woman – three members of a broken family – and their dogs collide with such force that their destinies are changed forever.

The Pigeon House

URUGAY

Director: Daniel Hendler
Producer: Micaela Solé

A group of technicians and advertising execs get together during a weekend to design the electoral campaign of a political leader without much clout or content, but with a rich following in the social networks. The objective is to achieve an alliance with a more weighty political structure that can help him ride the campaign train. However, there is a mole in the group, with unclear intentions, that will look for confidential information, installing a climate of mistrust and tension, transforming the brotherhood into a multiple-faced game.

Thursday to Sunday

CHILE / HOLANDA

Director: Dominga Sotomayor
Producer: Gregorio González


Through the distant, fragmented look of a girl, it all begins on Thursday: two kids, Lucía (10) and Manuel (7) go on vacation with their parents, Ana (35) and Fernando (38). The couple has decided to split up, but they had already planed making this journey. Little by little, the trip turns into a final goodbye: a long voyage where the children just want to get to the beach, Fernando longs to get to the place his father left him, and Ana, to an inexistent locale where everything will be alright again. Everything ends on Sunday.

The Beach

COLOMBIA

Director: Juan Andrés Arando / Diana Bustamante
Producer: Jorge Botero

Tomás, an Afro Colombian teen, displaced to Bogota, from the Colombian Pacific due to the war, fumbles around the big city searching for Jairo, his younger brother who has run away from home and is addicted to crack. Tomás’ initiation journey through the Colombian capital, a racist city far from the ocean, brings him knowledge of his identity, and helps him find a path in the middle of the hardness of the Bogota asphalt.

The Devil's Liquor

CHILE

Director: Ignacio Rodríguez
Producer: Tomás Arriagada


Old man Eladio is dying. Decades estranged from his family, he has spent most of his life in an old illegal liquor factory, that nowadays in its last days of existence. The threat of modernity intends to finish with his spirits business, which Eladio refuses to leave. Javier’s visit, his eldest grandson, comes as his only chance to save the factory, and also reunite with his family, without thinking it’s already too late.

The Search

MÉXICO

Director: José Luis Valle
Producer: José Luis Valle


Ulises wants to kill the man that stole his wallet; Elvira needs to understand the suicide of her husband. The heartache of loss will join us in an unexpected way. LA BÚSQUEDA speaks of revenge and redemption, of searching in the city without necessarily finding, of chance and infinite possibilities for happiness or tragedy.