Sex sells manifestos in Catalan elections

As the Catalans go to the ballots today after an election campaign dominated by sex and distasteful content, voters are left wondering why the parties went to such lengths to win their vote, and whether it will pay off.

With over 280,000 hits on You Tube, the Socialist Party’s video ‘Votar es un plaer‘ (Voting is a Pleasure), which shows a woman voter reaching orgasm at the ballot box, looks set to scoop the popularity prize. The ad was produced by the Young Socialists of Cataluña and aimed to interest young voters with quirky sexual content throughout.

The trend was set two weeks ago by the new Catalan Solidarity for Independence Party who recruited a porn star, Maria Lapiedra, to appear at their campaign rallies. Perhaps this is what’s to be expected from a party set up by Joan Laporta, the former chairman of Barcelona football club.

Opposition through film in Clandestí: Invisible Catalan Cinema under Franco

Little is known of the hardship the Spanish people experienced under Franco’s dictatorship from 1939 to 1975 due to press censorship and isolationism. However, a new series of films created in secrecy during his regime are set to reveal this suffering first hand, some for the first time.

Clandestí: Invisible Catalan Cinema under Franco, which takes place tomorrow until 30^th November at BFI Southbank, features works produced by a group of Catalan filmmakers who chronicled the lives of workers, activists and artists living in one of the most fierce centres of opposition to the fascist regime.

These brave artists were connected with workers’ movements and outlawed opposition parties, such as Santiago Carrillo’s Communists, and managed to distribute their film through recreation centres, private homes, cinema clubs, universities and schools. Many of the films have no credits in order to protect the identities of their participants.

Argentine director Teresa Costantini on her latest film, Felicitas

Teresa Costantini

As the director and actress Teresa Costantini leans towards me, asking my opinion of her latest film Felicitas, which received its European debut in the London Latin American Film Festival last week, I almost feel like I’ve become the interviewee. Her warmth, the type you find in so many Latin American people, makes her friendly and inquisitive and when we part I’m quickly aware that a good old British handshake does not suffice.

Brought up in Buenos Aires, Costantini has appeared in numerous popular Latin American films since her career took off in the early 1970s. Among the films she has directed, she won an Argentinean Film Critics Association Award for El Amor y La Ciudad in 2006.

Felicitas is an exquisite, emotionally harrowing film which portrays the story of Felicitas Guerrero de Álzaga who lived among the land-owning classes of Buenos Aires in the mid nineteenth century. The pattern of tragic events in her short life tells us a great deal about women’s position in the early Argentine Republic.

European premiere for Teresa Costantini’s Felicitas

The European premiere of Teresa Costantini’s latest film Felicitas lent an explosive start to the twentieth London Latin American Film Festival. It is a harrowing, emotional roller-coaster of a film that tells the story of Felicitas Guerrero de Álzaga who lived among the affluent, land-owning class of Buenos Aires in the nineteenth century.

Costantini’s portrayal of the time period is flawless; the colonial architecture, period dress, contrast of country and city and presentation of women’s role in society combine to transport the audience to the birth of the Argentine Republic. Many indications highlight women’s lack of independence as Felicitas’ father warns ‘ya tiene dueño’ (she already has a master) and her cousin’s progressive thesis on women’s rights is met with fierce opposition.

The film opens with a portrayal of blissful young love as Felicitas and her adoring boyfriend, Enrique Ocampo, laughingly chase one another through a pastoral scene. But, true to the biographical details of her life, it is not long before Felicitas’ childish ignorance is dashed by one tragedy after another.

At 15 years old she is betrothed to a wealthy landowner, Don Martín de Álzaga, who is 40 years her senior, and she is forbidden from ever speaking to Enrique again. Queue a series of uncomfortable wedding scenes in which the two barely speak, accompanied by the preamble to the couple’s first night together in which the sight of Álzaga undressing a tearful Felicitas makes one’s skin crawl.

Eva Tarr-Kirkhope: Fixated by film

She claims she is tired, and that’s to be expected after her months of hard work as director of the twentieth London Latin American Film Festival, which launches tonight. But despite her supposed fatigue, Eva Tarr-Kirkhope chatters away happily, driven by an infectious passion for Latin American cinema and clearly excited about what she hopes will be her best festival yet.

In Eva’s words, this year’s festival will be “really, really, really big”, celebrating both LLAFF’s 20^th anniversary and the bicentenary of Latin American independence. Over 40 films are showing at various venues and Eva hopes to pull in a crowd of up to 20,000 people, twice the number who attended last year’s event.

Eva Tarr-Kirkhope

But the festival has not always enjoyed such success since Eva and her husband first launched it in 1990 when Latin American film was barely known in London. “Back then the festival only lasted one week. We didn’t really know how to approach it then but it grew bit by bit. The audiences and the amount of films we have now is amazing.”

Originally from Cuba, Eva met her film-maker husband Tony Kirkhope in Havana and moved to the UK in 1979. Studying History of Art at Havana University, she had been influenced by the Cuban revolution’s push for social change and saw the lower classes empowered by education. After the revolution, she worked in Cuban cinema during its Golden Age when filmmakers such as Tomas Piard and Sara Gómez were creating new genres.

The best of Latin American film comes to London

Are you a fan of Alejandro González Iñárritu or Alfonso Cuarón? Do Gabriel García Bernal and Diego Luna make you go a bit weak at the knees? Do you relish the gritty realism of Rosario Tijeras or Amores Perros? Or perhaps you’re new to Latin American cinema, in which case a real treat awaits you. This month the London Latin American Film Festival (LLAFF) celebrates its 20th anniversary with more films on offer and more venues than ever before.

From 19th to 28th November LLAFF will showcase 40 of the latest offerings in Latin American cinema in seven venues across the capital. The festival is bigger than ever this year as its anniversary coincides with the bicentenary of Latin American Independence. Eva Tarr-Kirkhope, the director and founder of LLAFF, said: “I wanted to make this year really, really, really big and I’m so pleased we have had so many films submitted. I’m still receiving submissions now when the closing date was in July. We could potentially have an audience of up to 20,000 people in total. It is very exciting for me.”

Animated feature film Chico y Rita

Through documentaries, shorts and feature films the festival aims to tackle the most relevant and poignant themes to the Latin American people. The centrality of the family in Latin American culture is obvious across the different genres. Films such as Chico y Rita, The Crab, the Crocodile and Love in Cuba and Revolution present nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s, partly through a love of music. The documentary Rio Breaks, presents the poverty of Rio’s favelas with a twist as two young boys enter the surfer community of Arpoador Beach in search of making the big time.

Hello world: Paraguay’s Ayoreo Indians at risk from outside contact

In our modern, globalised world it is easy to assume that everyone partakes in a modern, technologically-advanced existence that revolves around computers, efficient transport, mass media and all the luxuries they entail. But earlier this week we were reminded that this is not the case as London’s Natural History Museum tackled criticism for their fact-finding mission to an area of Paraguay inhabited by an indigenous tribe.

The Ayoreo Indians who live in the forest expanse of the Gran Chaco, which stretches from Paraguay to Bolivia and Argentina, first came into contact with outsiders in the 1940s and 1950s. Today only 300 Ayoreos remain uncontacted out of a population of 2,000 according to Survival International. It is their virgin territory that the Natural History Museum’s scientists intend to visit.

Iniciativa Amotocodie, an indigenous people’s protection group based in Paraguay, has criticised the expedition saying that contact with previously isolated tribes will introduce new diseases and lead to ‘genocide’. Their spokesman said: “If this expedition goes ahead, we will not be able to understand why you prefer to lose human lives just because the English scientists want to study plants and animals”.

Pope Benedict XVI in an ‘aggressively secular’ Spain

During his two days in Spain, Pope Benedict XVI has succeeded in converting what could have been a victorious tour of a traditional Catholic stronghold into a visit mired in controversy. Before even arriving in Santiago de Compostela to begin his visit, the Pope told reporters that Spain was suffering an ‘aggressive secularism’, which he compared with the anticlericalism of the 1930s.

Zapatero alongside Pope Benedict in what seems an awkward encounter

By referring to the 1930s when Spain stood on the brink of a civil war, the Pope irresponsibly highlights political divisions that have been difficult to rid from the national consciousness. In the 1930s Spanish society was divided between liberal, left-wing Republicans and right-wing, largely Catholic Nationalists. The Second Republic from 1931 to 1936 passed legislation separating the church and the state, legalising divorce and allowing women the vote. During this time radical left-wingers demonstrated their anticlericalism through attacks on nuns and monks and by burning churches. To compare the current state of Spain’s Catholic Church to these violent acts carried out by a minority is not only inaccurate, it is irresponsible. In the past, comments like this could have served to polarise Spanish society, described by the Civil War expert Ángel Viñas as ‘un juego pendular’, or pendulum game, for its history of extreme left and right politics.

Spanish shock as Romanian girl of ten gives birth in Andalucía

Shockwaves were sent through the Spanish community today after it was revealed that a ten-year-old Romanian girl has given birth in Andalucía. Elena, dubbed ‘la niña-madre’ or child-mother in the press, lives with her mother, Olimpia, and other relatives in a community of Romanian gypsies in the Andalucian village of Lebrija.

But today the Spanish national El Mundo revealed that the child only arrived to stay with her mother in Spain three weeks ago and did so expressly to give birth last week with the help of Spanish healthcare.

Lebrija, Andalucia, where the 10-year-old stayed with family

The birth has not only offended the morality of conservative Andalucians but it has questioned the integration of the Romanian community in Spain and the nature of the welfare state provided by Zapatero’s Socialist party, PSOE. In a region of Spain partly characterised by an ageing population and a devout faith in Catholicism, the pregnancy of a ten-year-old girl has produced passionate censure.

Readers’ comments on the website of the local newspaper, El Diario de Jerez, range from criticising the child’s parents to the PSOE’s liberalism for welcoming Romanians to Spain. Some express their support for French President Sarkozy whose decision to extradite the Romanian community from France recently made headlines.

How will Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner fare without her political mentor?

As hundreds of mourners took to the streets of Buenos Aires last week to commemorate former Argentine President Néstor Kirchner, the future of Argentine politics lay in the balance. Kirchner’s death amounts to a political vacuum in a country that has been governed since 2001 by a power-sharing couple, criticised in the past for using their alliance to abuse presidential term limits.

Despite undergoing two major operations this year, Kirchner’s death shocked the public as the 60-year-old was widely expected to stand for office again in 2011. With only a weak and fragmented opposition to the Kirchner duo, it was likely they could have alternated the presidency for the foreseeable future.

But not only does the loss of Kirchner highlight the lack of organised opposition; it throws an unwelcome light on the government of his widow and current President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Fernández de Kirchner succeeded her husband as President in 2007 in a campaign that many believe he manufactured in order to resume the presidential role the following term. Despite strong economic growth and social progress under her leadership, Fernández de Kirchner has come under criticism from observers who perceive her as nothing more than her husband’s puppet.