Ohio Wesleyan to Host Spanish Film Festival Oct. 2-30
DELAWARE, Ohio – Ohio Wesleyan University will screen five contemporary Spanish and Latin American feature films from Oct. 2 through Oct. 30 as part of a free community Spanish Film Festival.
The university is one of 44 colleges nationwide selected to receive a 2012 Spanish Film Club Grant to support the fall festival. Admission is free for all films, which will feature English subtitles. All films will be shown in Ohio Wesleyan’s Phillips Hall Auditorium, 50 S. Henry St., Delaware. (Download and print a one-page film series flier.)
Scheduled films in the Spanish Film Festival series are:
6:30 p.m. Oct. 2 – “Chico & Rita” (2012, Cuba, 94 minutes.) An animated love story starring the music, culture, and people of Cuba. Chico is a dashing piano player, and Rita is a beautiful Havana nightclub singer. When they meet, the sparks fly. An epic romance unfolds as they travel the glamorous stages of 1940s-1950s Havana, New York City, Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Paris.
6:30 p.m. Oct. 10 – “Lope” (2011, Spain, 100 minutes.) Spanish playwright Lope de Vega’s passionate life comes to the big screen. The young poet returns to Madrid from war and gets his foot in the door of Madrid’s most important theatre troupe – quickly charming his boss’s daughter. His childhood friend, Isabel de Urbina, also falls under the spell of his poems. So much seduction eventually brings misfortune, and he must flee Madrid.
6:30 p.m. Oct. 18 – “La Yuma” (2011, Nicaragua, 91 minutes.) Nicaragua’s first full-length feature in 20 years, “La Yuma” tells the story of a young woman who dreams of transcending her bleak life in the slums of Managua by becoming a boxer. Looking beyond the meager possibilities that seem available to her (and ignoring the advice of her gang-member friends), she finds solace and hope in her training and falls in love with a middle-class journalism student.
6:30 p.m. Oct. 22 – “Southern District” (2011, Bolivia, 108 minutes.) La Paz’s Zona Sur (“Southern District”) neighborhood has housed the country’s elite for generations. The scent of impending decline permeates the air, and the threat of aristocratic privileges quickly changing hands heralds a new era in a seemingly interminable class war. Bolivia’s entry for the Academy Awards® foreign-language film race, this searing portrait of a patrician family in flux eloquently chronicles the family’s final days during a time of intense social change and cogently exposes the bubble of decadence in which the family exists.
6:30 p.m. Oct. 30 – “From the Land to Your Table” (2009, Argentina, Bolivia, Perú, Colombia, Venezuela, and Spain, 107 minutes.) What do you get when you take seven directors from seven countries with seven cultures and points of view? “From the Land to Your Table” shows the perspectives of seven talented filmmakers and directors from all over Latin America as they capture the conditions and cultural diversity of popular produce markets in their individual countries.
The grant supporting Ohio Wesleyan’s Spanish Film Festival was awarded by Pragda, an independent, New York- based cultural initiative. The grant was made possible with the support of Pragda, the Secretary of State for Culture of Spain, and its Program for Cultural Cooperation with United State’ Universities.
Ohio Wesleyan received the grant as a result of a proposal written by Glenda Y. Nieto-Cuebas, Ph.D., and Andrea Colvin, Ph.D., assistant professors of Spanish in the university’s Department of Modern Foreign Languages. The festival also is supported by Ohio Wesleyan’s Dean of Academic Affairs, Department of Modern Foreign Languages, Latin American Studies Program, and VIVA student organization.
Founded in 1842, Ohio Wesleyan University is one of the nation’s premier small, private universities. Ohio Wesleyan offers more than 90 undergraduate majors, sequences, and courses of study, and 23 NCAA Division III varsity sports. OWU combines an internationally focused curriculum with off-campus learning and leadership opportunities that connect classroom theory with real-world practice. Located in Delaware, Ohio, OWU’s 1,850 students represent 41 states and 45 countries. The university is featured in the book “Colleges That Change Lives,” listed on the 2012 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with distinction, and included on the “best colleges” lists of U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review. Learn more at www.owu.edu.