Lima – IILA, the Italo-Latin American International Organization, presents in Rome the winning films of the fifth edition of the IILA-Cinema Award, aimed at Latin American filmmakers under 40: Kinra by Marco Panatonic (Peru, 2023), winner in the fiction feature category, and Neirud by Fernanda Faya (Brazil, 2023), winner in the documentary feature category.
On May 8, as part of “La Nueva Ola” – the 18th Spanish and Latin American Film Festival at Cinema Barberini in Rome – the films will be screened in the presence of the directors, who will meet the audience after each showing.
The jury was chaired by Caterina D’Amico (Zeffirelli Foundation, former dean of the National Film School of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome) and included Esteban Ferrari (President of FEISAL – Federation of Latin American Film and Sound Schools), Argentine filmmaker Laura Citarella, Brazilian-Paraguayan professor Bruno López-Petzoldt, and Italian director Tommaso Santambrogio.
Filmed entirely in Quechua and featuring non-professional actors, Kinra follows the physical and emotional journey of a young Andean farmer grappling with cultural uprooting, linguistic discrimination, and the tension between memory and modernity. Neirud, with a visionary and poetic style, reconstructs the life and mysterious death of a queer activist in Brazil between the 1960s and 1980s, blending real and imagined archives to reflect on collective memory and historical invisibility.
The IILA-Cinema Award renews its collaboration with the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies at Sapienza University of Rome, which will also present the Youth Jury Prize. The award is promoted by IILA with support from the Directorate General for Development Cooperation of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This year, 88 directors from 14 Latin American countries took part.