The Guadalajara Reporter

Film festival primed for Nordic invasion

Guadalajara’s 28th International Film Festival (FICG28) gets underway on Friday, with the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden as this year’s special guests.

Over nine days, around 100,000 guests, including acclaimed actors, directors and industry professionals, will descend upon Guadalajara to catch screenings of hundreds of movies, documentaries and short films from Mexico, Latin America, the United States, Canada, Spain and the aforementioned Nordic states.

There will be 57 films from these Nordic countries shown at the festival, including a retrospective of 13 movies made by acclaimed Swedish director Jan Troell. Among the most notable Nordic movies on show is the Oscar-nominated “Kon-Tiki,” which will be screened on Friday, March 1.

Named after the Inca sun god, “Kon-Tiki” tells the true story of Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl, who in 1947 built a balsa-wood raft and sailed for 101 days from Peru to Polynesia in a bid to prove that pre-Columbian civilizations from South America could have crossed the Pacific Ocean and settled in the Polynesian islands.

Aside from film screenings, the FICG28 will also host a concert by Mexican pop-rock singer Carla Morrison at the Auditorio Telmex on March 2, a series of lectures and roundtables and a forum for major distribution deals.

“The festival is not only an opportunity to enjoy the international film industry and host its best productions, all the people involved in it and the amazing event it is,” FICG President Raul Padilla Lopez said at a press conference last week, “but also an occasion to highlight the fact that in Guadalajara we have the ability to hold Ibero-America’s main cinematographic event.”

Organized by the University of Guadalajara (UdeG), the National Council for Culture and the Arts (Conaculta) and the Mexican Institute of Cinematography (Imcine), the event takes place from March 1 to 9, primarily in the Expo Guadalajara convention center (Avenida Mariano Otero 1499), but with additional screenings and events at the Centro Magno Cinepolis, the Cineforo (Avenida Juarez and Enrique Diaz de Leon), the Museo de Artes (Juarez 975), the Foro Larva (Ocampo 120), the Teatro Diana (16 de Septiembre 710), the Auditorio Telmex (Obreros de Cananea 747) and the new Jalisco State Public Library (Manuel Gomez Morin 1695).

The exact times and locations of all the screenings have yet to be released but for more information visit the FICG28’s English-language website at www.ficg.mx/28/index.php/en/