Saturday, July 6, 2013

Maria Conchita Alonso and Zoe Bell raise temperatures at Aruba Fest

The celebrity guests at the 2013 Aruba International Film Festival (AIFF) may not be instantly recognizable names, but they're an interesting and eclectic bunch. Along with the many young, aspiring, refreshingly friendly filmmakers here from the Caribbean and Latin America, the fest has welcomed talents ranging from Cuban-Venezuelan actress and singer Maria Conchita Alonso, who starred opposite Robin Williams, Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage and Arnold Schwarzenegger in her Hollywood heyday; Zoë Bell, the stuntwoman from "Xena" and Kill Bill who is now an actress
Raze
thanks to Quentin Tarantino casting her in a prominent role in Death Proof; Holland's most successful film director, Paul Verhoeven (see our earlier post); actors Virginia Madsen (returning for the second year in a row), Tracie Thoms and Joseph Cross; and producer Randall Emmett, whose credits include End of Watch, 16 Blocks, Narc, Broken City, the upcoming 2 Guns, Lone Survivor and Escape Plan, and Martin Scorsese's next film, Silence. Emmett was in Aruba with his crime thriller Empire State, starring Dwayne Johnson and Liam Hemsworth and directed by Dito Montiel, and participated in a frank Q&A with Hollywood Reporter executive editor Stephen Galloway.


It's tough to compete with the beaches here, so screenings don't start till 4 pm, but Arubans and visitors with a keen interest in the movie industry could enjoy earlier one-on-one interviews, panel discussions and "master classes" that combined fun anecdotes with real career advice for people from this region pondering how to break into the business.


The two women who participated in one-on-one conversations were especially entertaining. Maria Conchita Alonso, wearing a huge orange floppy hat, lime-green slacks and a green and tan shawl, was fighting a bad cold but nonetheless charmed the audience with her tales of teaching Arnold Schwarzenegger how to do a screen kiss, how dressing down lost her the chance to be a Bond girl, and the challenges facing Latina actresses in Hollywood.  ("I'll play a maid if I can also play a queen.") One of her favorite roles was in the cult Nicolas Cage movie Vampire's Kiss: "I had to play an innocent, virgin girl...which I wasn't." Alonso, who once had a number-one disco song in Venezuela called "Love Maniac," recalled how she was named on a list of celebrities with the best breasts in that country, even though she considers hers average. "But I hate bras," she confided. "I've always loved my breasts, and I still do."


Alonso was in Aruba to promote the documentary Femmes, in which she appears along with a wide range of confident women including Gloria Steinem, Marianne Williamson and Sharon Stone. She's also been involved for years (pre-The Artist) with a silent, black-and-white project, Return to Babylon, in which she plays doomed '20s and '30s film star Lupe Velez. Her most recent movie credit: The Lords of Salem, directed by horror auteur Rob Zombie. Too bad the session ended before anyone could ask about the combustible combination of Alonso and Zombie.


The irrepressible Zoë Bell, interviewed by the BBC's Emma Jones, was also great fun, reminiscing about how she got the job as stunt double for Lucy Lawless on the TV series "Xena: Warrior Princess"; how Quentin Tarantino probably wouldn't have given her the role in Death Proof if she'd had any acting experience; how her training as a gymnast prepared her for the literal hard-knock life of a stuntwoman; and the terrible accident on Kill Bill that sidelined her for a year. Bell was in Aruba to promote Raze (which she produced as well as stars in), a fantasy thriller about a group of women who are abducted and forced to fight to the death. Her promo efforts went so far as a live stunt-fighting demo at the beach, opposite co-star Tracie Thoms.


AIFF lost its government funding this year and co-founder and executive editor Jonathan Vieira invested a significant amount of his own money to keep the fest afloat. Although there were no huge marquee names at the 2013 event, the programming seemed more astute than last year's. The emphasis on films from the Southern hemisphere yielded some true discoveries. Chief among them for this writer was Edificio Royal, a darkly comic tale of a once-grand but now rundown and roach-infested apartment building in Barranquilla, Colombia, and the eccentric people who reside there. They include a demanding diva, an embalmer and his tarot card-obsessed wife, an elderly couple dealing with Alzheimer's, and a very harried superintendent. Iván Wild's film, dominated by elegantly choreographed long takes and a fractured time scheme, all takes place inside the building and casts an unsettling spell reminiscent of Roman Polanski's The Tenant. Wild is certainly a new talent to watch.


The "Caribbean Spotlight Series" Jury Award winner, Venezuela's Breach of Silence, also boasted a confident and sensuous visual style. Luis and Andrés Rodriguez's drama is the harrowing story of a deaf girl who is being abused by her stepfather and is unable to communicate her plight to the rest of her family. Then her sister is also targeted.


Oppressive lives were a frequent subject of the AIFF entries from the Southern hemisphere. Billy Raftery's Angels in Exile is a powerful and intimate look at the lives of Ariel and Zuleikia, teenage victims of abuse living on the streets in a very dangerous part of Durban, South Africa. Raftery gained the trust of his young subjects, and what his cameras capture is often shocking beyond belief. But hold tight: This documentary, against all expectations, culminates in a happy ending.


Songs of Redemption, from Spanish directors Amanda Sans and Miguel Galofré, looks at a music program that has redeemed the lives of inmates at the General Penitentiary in Kingston, Jamaica. The filmmakers found a number of charismatic subjects there, and captured a number of indelible moments, like a prisoner shedding tears over his murder of his wife, followed in the same take by a heartfelt rendition of one of his original songs.


Another prison portrait was Captive Beauty, which follows a beauty pageant inside a facility for women in Medellin, Colombia, and the diverse stories of several inmates whose hopes are either fulfilled or dashed during the course of the film. American Jared Goodman directed, and doc veteran Joe Berlinger is one of the producers.


The festival also included a gem from Australia and Laos, The Rocket, the artful and audience-pleasing tale of a Laotian boy who is considered cursed because he's a surviving twin, and the difficult path he takes to prove his worth. Kim Mordaunt's wonderful film won several top prizes at the Tribeca Film Festival and was a valuable addition to the AIFF lineup.


Finally, of special interest to our readers in exhibition is Finding Hillywood, Leah Warshawski and Chris Towey's doc about a filmmaking program that has helped the war-torn country of Rwanda to heal, and the man named Ayuub who brings those homegrown films to remote villages using an inflatable screen. Although many of the films deal with very troubling issues, the screening audiences are rapt. Yes, the power of cinema is alive and well even in Rwanda.



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