Tania Delgado Fernández, director of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, declared the 46th edition of the event inaugurated this Thursday. This year’s festival dedicates its sessions to honouring the memory of its founder, the distinguished Cuban filmmaker Alfredo Guevara, on the 100th anniversary of his coming into the world.

At this opening ceremony, whose date coincides exactly with the creation of the Foundation of New Latin American Cinema (FNCL) forty years ago, Delgado Fernández extolled the capacity for resistance and reinvention as virtues that have enabled the development of this new edition, despite adversities.

She added that this Latin American and honest, open cinema; raw at times, poetic always; dreamy and magical, is what allows us to return each year to this meeting in this beautiful city; besides signifying that through the seventh art it is possible to recognise the multiple realities of each one of the societies.

For his part, Alexis Triana Hernández, president of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), recalled in an impassioned speech the ideals of Guevara, which remain alive in the festival’s essence, in the effort to bring it to all of Cuba to heal the people who are going through adversities, because, he assured, art also heals.

Evocations of that date on which the FNCL emerged were not lacking, when artists from the continent gathered at the former Santa Bárbara farm, headed by the Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz and the Colombian writer and Nobel Literature Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, with the imperative purpose of continuing to work for a cinema committed to the realities of the peoples of our continent.

The first night of the most cinematic festival in Cuba unfolded thus, between remembrances and celebrations; also amidst the music of the group Espirales, the presentation by José María Vitier, the awarding of the Honorary Coral prize to the octogenarian Churubusco Studios of Mexico; and – as a culmination – the presentation of the Argentine feature film Belén, by filmmaker Dolores Fonzi.