Itinerant Shows for Latin America

The circulation through Latin America of the Festival of Preservation, a retrospective show of the National Taipei Film Archive, started in April. The project, supported and coordinated from Montevideo (Cinemateca Uruguaya), has scheduled screenings of Taiwanese films in twenty cities. Our Taipei colleagues took charge of making new 35mm copies of all the films, and the Latin American Archives are handling transport costs and the final return of the prints. The ten feature package surveys the history and evolution of the Taiwanese cinema, which will be seen for the first time in South America. The screenings in each country are organized and sponsored by the respective Latin American archives. This globe-spanning exhibition program is an exemplary demonstration of the cooperation practiced and encouraged by FIAF archives.

The Taiwanese project is the last of a series organized by CLAIM (Coordination of Latin American Moving Image Archives) a sui generis organization without formal structure or permanent premises, formed by colleagues of the region. CLAIM, which has meetings during some of the Latin American film festivals and sometimes also during the FIAF congresses, coordinates different projects, including the organization of traveling shows. The first one started in 1993 after an agreement between Pro Helvetia and the Cinemateca Uruguaya. Since then, Czech national shows (with the Narodni Fimlovy Archiv), the Best One Hundred Spanish Films (with the ICI), a Danish film week (with the Danske Filminstitut), and the Festival of Preservation (with the National Taipei Film Archive) have been circulated, all coordinated from Montevideo. Other series have been organized through the Japan Foundation, the British Film Institute, the CENAC of Venezuela, by the colleagues of Cinemateca Argentina, Cinemateca Nacional de Caracas, and the Colombian Cinematecas associated with the Centro Colombo-Americano of Medellin. Because CLAIM has no fixed infrastructure, the organizing archive for each program takes responsibility for coordinating screenings, film traffic and the distribution of publicity materials and informative and analytical catalogues. The archives have mounted some very successful shows, attracting as many as 20,000 spectators for these programs and raising considerably public awareness of archives, preservation and film culture in general. Apart form these cultural initiatives, CLAIM was the origin of the important Latin American initiatives including REDARIM (the network of film documentation), specialized courses for Latin American archive technicians in Sâo Paulo, and Mexico, and the agreements to further the development of regional laboratories for the archives. There have been important progress on all of these fronts. Other significant efforts of regional coordination include the collaboration between the Brazilian and Uruguayan Archives in the context of MERCOSUR (the periodic meetings of the documentation specialists of Cinemateca Uruguaya, Cinemateca Brasilera and, since May 1996, the Archivo Nacional de la Imagen), to establish standardized methods of information gathering among archives. The Cinemateca do MAM will also join in this project.