Diego Peretti and Maribel Verdu in a scene from No Kids (Sin hijos) screening at the Latin festival in Whanganui.
Photo/Supplied
The Latin America and Spain Film Festival comes to an end today with the showing of an Ecuadorian mockumentary, followed by a romantic comedy from Argentina.
2016 film A Secret in the Box (Un secreto en la caja) laments the plight of Ecuador, relegated to the role of little cousin
to its bigger and more successful neighbours in South America.
With Ecuador never having a Nobel prize-winning literary figure to rival Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez, Argentina's Borges, Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa or Chile's Pablo Neruda, director Javier Izquierdo is forced to invent Marcelo Chiriboga, a fictional famous author, to explore the country's identity crisis.
Poking fun at the literary world and the nation's pathetic history of ceding territory to its neighbours over many decades of war, Izquierdo highlights the politics, preoccupations and obsessions of his homeland. Chiriboga, "the tropical Kafka," becomes the last vestige of a country at risk of fading into oblivion.
The romantic comedy which closes the festival later in the evening could not be more different. Ariel Winograd's No Kids (Sin hijos) was a major hit in Argentina and ran twelve weeks at Number 1.
