CINE LAS AMERICAS

A cinematic evolution

By Michael Barnes
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, April 11, 2008

Veteran observers can sense when a cultural group is ready to graduate.

When a particular organization has passed the nascent conceptual stages, heady first months — or even years — of media and audience buzz, honeymoon with early backers or grant-makers, tricky changes in leadership and evolving definition of its identity and mission.

The group is now ready to expand its reach, saturate the public consciousness, establish an institutional record and — no small thing — attract the real money that comes with recognition of its cultural indispensability.

That graduation appears to be nigh for Cine las Americas, the Austin-based film promoter which reintroduces its core program, an annual international film festival, beginning Wednesday.

"Cine las Americas has set the standard for culturally focused film festivals in Austin," says Rebecca Campbell, director of Austin Film Society, which has acted as a sort of midwife for Cine. "Their festival and year-round programming greatly enriches the Austin film scene."

"Taking a festival to another level is not without challenges, but Cine las Americas has done so gracefully by sticking to their mission statement year after year with programming that would not have made it to Austin audiences," says Kelly Williams, program director for the much larger Austin Film Festival. "They add a vital part to the tapestry of the Austin film scene."

Cine's twin pillars — also its only full-time employees — are director of programming Jacqueline Rush Rivera and executive director Eugenio del Bosque. Originally from Puerto Rico, trained in visual arts at Antioch College in Ohio, Rush Rivera interned at Austin's immigrant center Casa Marianella and attended Cine's first Cuban-themed festival in 1997. Video editor del Bosque arrived from Mexico City and served as director of programming until he took the top position three years ago.

They share poster-plastered, Macintosh-computer-and-folk-art littered offices on a palm-fringed plaza on San Marcos Street with dozens of part-timers and volunteers, who help with the outreach programs at area schools and the media resource center. They run a periodic program with a budget of almost $250,000 that makes an impression on more than 150 Austin school district student filmmakers each year, as well as on their colleagues at international festivals in Argentina, Mexico and elsewhere, showing more than 80 films competing over nine festival days.

"Reaching institutional status for us means year-round programming and a bit of traveling with our programming to other cities in Texas," says del Bosque. "In 2001, when Cine became a nonprofit, that's when we started outreach at schools, and is also the time when the festival needed to be curated like other international festivals of its kind. In 2003, we began to include indigenous works, which opened the door to a true pan-American program. Also, in 2004, we gathered the right kind of support to invite the filmmakers. That made it into a real event of international proportions."

Both Cine leaders are grateful for support from University of Texas programs, Austin Film Society and other small festival organizers around town. Employing marketing and professional publicists for they first time, del Bosque and Rush Rivera would like to reach sell-out attendance of 10,000-plus this year, but that's a distant goal with so many film fests and series in town.

"Programming-wise, there's a little bit of competition and overlap," del Bosque says. "The Latino market is something everyone is looking for a slice of. Our market is not exclusively Latino, though our programming is mostly Latino. But as things become global and, especially, Mexican directors are making waves across the world, the bigger festivals are giving attention to some of this work. It means competition, but also helps us keep our antennae out."

Both leaders appear ready for their close-ups.

"We've been under the radar for a long time," Rush Rivera says. "Explaining ourselves to the local community has always been challenging. Being outsiders, we can explain it to people in Buenos Aires or Los Angeles or New York, but at the end of the day, people ask, 'Yes, but what movies do you have about the border?' We do have several movies about the border and immigration, but we are about so much more than that."

In fact, Cine is more closely related to international fests around the world than Latino-specific fests in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere.

"We are not so identity-based," says Rush Rivera. "When other festivals have Latino filmmakers, most of the discussion is about identity and stereotypes. We don't really do that. We show upwards of 80 films, so no stereotypes. It's really about film."