An unusual film festival in the heart of the suburbs

In 2003, at the height of the so-called “New Argentine Cinema”a group of film school students came together to establish a unique cultural event in The slaughter. In the Buenos Aires municipality with the most inhabitants, within the neighboring town of Tapiales, the first edition of the Tapiales International Short Film Festival. The purpose of the meeting was to show the community the films, in short film format, of the country’s future filmmakers.

In 2022, those young pioneers who grew up following in the footsteps of benchmarks such as Pablo Trapero, Lucrecia Martel, Damian Szifron and Adrian CaetanoThey became filmmakers, film producers and professional cultural managers, but they maintained the same voluntary project of bringing cinema to the neighborhood without interruption. This year, the Tapiales International Short Film Festival (TAFIC) It will be screened in the main square of the town, on Saturday, November 19 and Sunday, November 20, from 6 to 10 pm, with free admission.

“About 1,300 works registered for the festival, of which fifty were selected for competitive programming. What is awarded are the categories for Best National Short Film, Best Foreign Short Film, Best Director, Best Production and Best Script, then there are a series of mentions and the maximum prize is the Querandí statuette. The themes are free and open to the public, reflecting at all levels the stories that society deals with”, he points out. Julio Caloggerodirector of the TAFIC.

In addition to the curious characteristic of being the only competitive short film festival, outdoors and with a validity of almost twenty years, it also has the quality of offering gastronomic fairs and food trucks in the surroundings of the square so that the visitor can taste a dish. while accompanying the viewing of the films. On Saturday the programming opens with the sample of the Matanza Film Workshop Let’s Film, the first free educational film space for all ages, which will exhibit the productions of its students on the big screen within the festival.

Among the anecdotes of this cultural proposal, we remember the various awards that were granted, which as the years passed, changed their shape and name. At the beginning it was a plate with the municipal logo, then it became a Querandí Indian, then a movie camera and, finally, an aborigine holding a film camera. The awards ceremony takes place in the same square, with the responsible juries presenting the statuette to the winning short films.

“The festival was never cancelled, in times of the pandemic two editions were produced virtually through digital platforms in tune with some of the world’s prestigious film festivals. This year it has the particularity of returning to face-to-face and also maintaining the virtual broadcast to be able to see the short films, wherever they are. The volunteers are students, local filmmakers and people committed to the local culture, which gives the event that warmth and connotation”, explains Caloggero.

Tapiales Short Film Festival

Following in the footsteps of “The Asylum of the Beast”the first award-winning Argentine short film in 2003, in this edition films from different parts of the world compete, such as Spain, the United States, the Dominican Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, Chile and Mexico, which is added to the national audiovisual proposal. However, on Friday the 18th, a special exhibition of winning shorts from other editions will be screened at the Leopoldo Marechal de Ramos Mejía House of Culture, as an opening.

Throughout the decades up to the present, the cinematographic meeting was sponsored by the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA), the Secretary of Culture of the Municipality, the Cultural Institute of the Province of Buenos Aires, Signis Argentina and RAFMAwhich kept him installed as an audiovisual cultural reference in the Buenos Aires region.

You may also like

Image gallery

e planning ad

ttn-25