By Dario Montero
MONTEVIDEO, Jan 19 1999 (IPS)

An international film festival kicked off Monday in the Uruguayan resort town of Punta del Este with a view to opening up new space for quality European film in Latin America, swamped for years by a flood of U.S. productions.

The ‘Europa, un cine de punta II’ (Europe, at the Vanguard in Film II) festival – which runs until Jan. 24 – includes some 20 productions from Germany, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Romania and Russia.

With thousands of summer tourists – mostly from Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay – now in Punta del Este, the festival has given a very diverse audience has a chance to see the kinds of films that have virtually disappeared from the region, where U.S. film industry has eclipsed Europe’s.

The festival’s programme director, Argentine critic Carlos Morelli, said in an interview that showcasing European film was a contribution to “the tough struggle this industry has been waging against the despotic and dictatorial push of the U.S. producers”.

The idea is “to give back to the public the kinds of films they have not been able to see for several years, so that it can assess the degree of development it has reached”, said Morelli. He recalled that it was the public in Uruguay and Argentina that discovered Ingmar Bergman, for example, even before the Europeans themselves.

According to Morelli, the 20 films are among “the best productions from (Europe) in the past 12 months”.

For Morelli, however, it’s not a matter of declaring war on Hollywood movies. The exhibition includes an American Evening, on which it will celebrate the 60th anniversary of ‘Gone With the Wind’, the quintessential classic of U.S. film.

Morelli, who was in charge of the selection of the films along with the festival’s president, Ricardo Dutra of Uruguay, said there had been many festivals dominated by U.S. films.

He said European film has been marginalized worldwide due to strong pressure from the U.S. film industry and because U.S. distribution firms also monopolize distribution and exhibition circuits.

“They have built a kind of perverse closed circuit into which nobody but they (U.S. movies) have access or are considered worthy of acceptance,” he argued.

France, for example, has a strong, high-quality film industry and, up to four years ago, there were as many French films as U.S. ones in local cinemas. Today French productions represent just 11 percent of the circuit.

The situation is similar in Spain, where 13 percent of the films shown are locally produced, whereas 80 percent come from the United States.FILM-URUGUAY: European Films Counter U.S. Invasion

The situation is worse in Latin America, where U.S. films account for more than 90 percent of those shown. This has fuelled a severe crisis in local film industries which used to be bustling in past decades, like those of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, said Morelli.

He said that in late February, Punta del Este will also host a festival featuring the latest films from the Southern Cone Common Market (MERCOSUR) region: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Film festivals in Punta del Este go back to the 1950s. The first was organised in February 1951 by Argentine entrepreneur Mauricio Litman.

Back then, the presence of stars like Gerard Philipe, from France, and world premieres of films by Rene Clair and Christian Jaque brought Punta del Este – then just a village – to the world’s attention.

Structured in the fashion of the big festivals like Venice and Cannes, the 1952 event was a lackluster affair, due to lack of support from the Uruguayan government, though it did bring films like ‘Rashomon’ from Japan and ‘Umberto D’ from Vittorio da Sica.

It was also in Punta del Este that Polish director Andrzej Wajda emerged, and where Bergman’s ‘Youth Divine Treasure’ opened – outside of Europe – allowing the critics from Montevideo and Buenos Aires to discover the director before the French experts.

It was only in 1956 that the Cannes festival gave Bergman an award for his comedy ‘Smiles on a Summer Night’.

In 1953 and 1954, the festival was devoted exclusively to French and Italian films respectively, in what appeared to be the end of the experiment.

However, in 1955, business people organized the Third International Film Festival of Punta del Este, which featured works like ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Castellani, and ‘Rats’ Nest’, by Elia Kazan, though neither participated in the competition.

The low quality of the works shown at that competition led the jury – presided by prestigious theater critic Jose Maria Podesta – to quash it.

As of 1955, Punta del Este was excluded from the Category A film festivals for not meeting the requirements of the International Producers’ Association.

The Punta del Este festival – like the London and Mar del Plata (Argentina) festivals – is one of the few opportunities the public has of seeing films that are different from Hollywood’s.

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