Biblioburro is the story of a librarian – and a library – like no other. A decade ago, Colombian grade-school teacher Luis Soriano was inspired to spend his weekends bringing a modest collection of precious books, via two hard-working donkeys, to the children of Magdalena Province’s poor and violence-ridden interior. As Soriano braves armed bands, drug traffickers, snakes and heat, his library on hooves carries an inspirational message about education and a better future for Colombia. His simple yet extraordinary effort has attracted worldwide attention – and imitators – but his story has never been better told than in this heart-warming yet unsentimental film.

After 10 years living abroad, travel journalist Andrés briefly returns to his native Chile to attend to some unfinished business. The action takes place in real time and follows the course of events of one evening, as Andrés is reunited with his childhood friends and the love of his life. The beautiful cinematography, spot-on acting, and carefully composed script all combine to create an atmosphere that is subtly intense.

La vida do los peces was directed by Matías Bize (En la cama) and won the award for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film at the 25th Goya Awards.

New talent, tax incentives, strong local box offices and multi-country collaborations are among the reasons for the current boom in Latin American cinema.

“All Latin American countries have different strengths and weaknesses,” said Mr. Hugo Villa, director of film production at the Mexican Film Institute. “Some have a larger and more experienced local industry, others have an emerging generation of financiers, or a huge base of college students on film related majors.”

Latin American cinema is booming. Almost every Latin American nation has increased their local content production, either by doubling their initiatives to boost film industries, or by excelling in their capacity to attract foreign productions.

Colombia is on the verge of passing a proposal for a new tax incentive plan designed exclusively for international productions, which has attracted many foreign projects to the nation.

Argentina is working on a foreign financing scheme of their own, while in Uruguay, an incentive for production services and co-productions, gives a VAT exemption of 22 percent and helps the export of audio-visual content with up to 75 percent; Brazil offers a whole myriad of filming incentives and leads the continent’s film explosion, by virtue of its many award winning local productions as well as the export of its directors to Hollywood, and being the south American leader in box office returns.

2010 saw Brazil beat their own record of box office sales with 135 million tickets sold, the strongest performance of the 2000’s. The nation’s federal support for film production, distribution and exhibition amounts to approximately US$78 million per year.

In Mexico, an incentive introduced last year gives up to 17.5 percent of the production budget spent in Mexico back to foreign films; Argentina is in the drawing-board stages of a similar incentive, “At the moment, we don’t have national incentives for the cinema productions, but in the city of Buenos Aires we are working on the implementation of an Audiovisual Law, which declares the audiovisual sector as an industry and therefore provides a series of tax reductions to the local companies,” said the Argentine film commissioner, Ana Aizenberg. “This, of course, will also benefit international productions, by lowering the costs of producing in Buenos Aires.”

In Colombia, public funding is available for local productions and co-productions. The 2003 Colombian Cinema Law, created the Film Development Fund to provide financial incentives to festival competition winners, support film-related expenses, and grant incentives for promotion and participation of films in festivals.

“The greatest challenge for the Colombian film industry is to attract a bigger audience not only nationally but internationally by coproducing more films and incorporating international talent to local films in order to get audience from other countries in Latin America, and the Latin audience in the United States.” Said Colombian Film Commissioner Silvia Echeverri.

In the meantime, Uruguay is living through its largest boom ever, as not only went from exporting 15 percent of its audio-visual content in 2001, to exporting 95% of its content, but the nation saw productions recreate places as different as the Old Havana, Paris, London, Germany, the Caribbean, Italy and within its bounds. Uruguay is currently preparing to receive a new Serbian production.

The UK’s first national Green Film Festival will showcase the best in green films and filmmakers over a single weekend in venues across the country (Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, and London). A wide range of films from local and international filmmakers will feature, with the environment and climate change as central themes. Some will be UK premieres; some will be classics; some will be re-contextualised; some will be (mainly) for kids. All will challenge, inspire and entertain.

The full programme, including a listing of feature length films, short films and complementary events and activities is published on the UK Green Film Festival website.

The Films (some examples):

The Age of Stupid

The Age of Stupid stars Pete Postlethwaite as a man living in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

The End of the Line

The first major feature documentary film revealing the impact of overfishing on our oceans. Filmed over two years, we see firsthand the effects of our global love affair with fish as food. The film examines the imminent extinction of bluefin tuna, brought on by increasing western demand for sushi; the impact on marine life resulting in huge overpopulation of jellyfish; and the profound implications of a future world with no fish that would bring certain mass starvation.

Vanishing of the Bees

In the UK, around one fifth of the honeybee hives were lost in the winter of 2008/09. Bees pollinate a third of the food we eat, and this contributes £200 million a year to the UK economy. Vanishing of the Bees, is an eye-opening account of the shocking truth behind the declining bee population.

Fields of Fuel

America is addicted to oil and it is time for an intervention. Enter Josh Tickell, a man with a plan and a Veggie Van, who is taking on big oil, big government, and big soy to find solutions in places few people have looked.

Green

Green is an orangutan who is a victim of deforestation and resource exploitation. This award-winning documentary takes you on an emotional journey through her final days.

Planeat

Planeat is the story of three men’s life-long search for a diet, which is good for our health, good for the environment and good for the future of the planet.

El Hombre De Al Lado (The Man Next Door), written by Andrés Duprat and directed by Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn, is a good film not only because of the simple and yet exceptionally well structured plot line, but also because of the brilliantly natural performances given by leading actors Rafael Spregelburd (who plays Leonardo, an incredibly successful architect with a self-designed property that attracts visitors and fans of his work on a daily basis) and Daniel Aráoz (who plays Victor, Leonardo’s next door neighbour).

The film in terms of location and structure is so simple that it would work excellently as a piece of live theatre, just as much as it does on the screen, and it is in this simplicity that ‘El Hombre De Al Lado’ manages to reach an unexpected and dramatic ending.

The story follows a few months in the life of Leonardo and his ‘neighbour from hell,’ Victor, from the moment that Victor decides to break through one of the walls in his apartment in order to create a window that looks directly into the living area of Leonardo’s house.

Leonardo and his wife complain about the window and threaten legal action from the beginning of the film to the end, but Victor, despite agreeing to filling in the hole that he has created on a number of occasions, continues to enjoy the light that the hole brings to his home and the view that it gives him of his neighbour’s house.

What is most interesting about the narrative of this film, however, is that basic stereotypes and pre-conceived notions that we all perhaps hold about who is a respectable neighbour and who is a ‘neighbour from hell’ are manipulated and turned on their heads.

Is Victor really the one in the wrong? Is Victor really the neighbour that is causing all of the problems? Is Victor really the neighbour that you shouldn’t trust? Or is it Leonardo; the supposedly hard-working architect, with a wife and child and a well-organized life style?

El Hombre De Al Lado is a great Argentine flick, full of moral questions that begin to revolve around inside the audience’s heads as soon as the credits begin to roll. For this reason Duprat and Cohn’s movie has a lot more to offer than perhaps appears on the surface.

Pamela Yates, director of the new film, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, and a documentary filmmaker with Skylight Pictures, believes taking a journalistic film about war crimes prosecution to the Academy Awards could help elevate human rights causes in the West.

Many before her have tried to ‘mainstream’ human rights documentaries, but her new film is unique in that it not only documents war crimes, but documents how that original footage is being used in a genocide case against a former head of state.

When Ms. Yates first travelled with a documentary team to Guatemala in the 1980′s and filmed When the Mountains Tremble, the country was headed into a horrific civil war. Many saw the country as a proxy game board for Cold War adversaries.

According to Guatemala’s military records from the mid-1980s opened in the trial against former Guatemalan autocrat General Efrain Rios Montt held in Spain, patrols regularly recorded notes about how they systematically burned houses, destroyed crops, captured and killed civilians in the protracted war between the U.S.-backed military government and left guerrillas.

Many of those killed were Mayan indigenous minority civilians who were caught in the crossfire. Some evidence alleges that Montt’s forces even took detained guerrillas and civilians and threw them out of helicopters into the sea to kill them. Every case has gaps, so prosecutors looked at When the Mountains Tremble and its outtakes for more evidence on whether and to what extent the Montt regime may have killed tens of thousands. Ms. Yates then made a film about her film’s unique re-emergence. Montt, meanwhile, still serves as a politician in Guatemala.

Granito has already won the Peace and Reconciliation Prize at the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival and the Grand Prix at the Paris International Human Rights Film Festival. Could it make it to the Oscars in 2012 and help increase global attention to human rights documentaries?

If you go down to the woods tonight you’re unlikely to encounter anything quite as rich, strange or plain scary as this genre-mashing magic-realist thriller from the visionary Mexican director of Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone and Hellboy.

Shot in Spain and set in the bitter aftermath of the Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth is a dark cousin of Alice In Wonderland that pointedly contrasts the evils of human beings above ground with the creepy supernatural beasts below.

Ivana Baquero is terrific as Ofelia, a bookish young girl who is lured into a mysterious subterranean kingdom while her widowed mother Carmen (Ariadne Gil) struggles with her bullying new fiancé, Vidal. Played by Sergi Lopez, Vidal is a sadistic Captain in Franco’s army who thinks nothing of torturing innocent villagers in pursuit of anti-fascist partisans.

Pan’s Labyrinth is unashamedly a fantasy yarn, but freighted with enough political subtext and visceral human cruelty to transcend the genre’s geek boy reputation. Admittedly some of Ofelia’s underworld digressions threaten to slow down a meandering plot, while Vidal veers perilously close to pantomime caricature. But viewed through the melodramatic eyes of a lonely girl, Guillermo del Toro’s visually ravishing fairy tale makes perfect sense, hits all the right gothic notes, and ends on a satisfying emotional crescendo.

The War You Don’t See is a compelling, hard-hitting documentary which explicitly poses and sets about answering the controversial question – has mainstream media become a part of rapacious war-making?

The disturbing answer would appear to be yes, as the damning evidence is stacked up during the course of this startling exposé from John Pilger – focusing on the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and how each has been portrayed by the UK and US television medias.

Pilger also examines the history of the relationship between the media and government in times of conflict going as far back as World War I and explores the impact of this on the information provided for public consumption. He shows us how mainstream media rather than investigating the truth often opts to echo and promote the government’s war propaganda.

This point is poignantly made with WWI footage of soldiers crying for their mothers as they lay dying on the battlefields – footage that was almost never shown to the public.

Similarly he argues that today’s public receives a very filtered and fragmented picture of the reality of war from the media, with the full toll of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan being concealed from Western audiences, as well as the abuse of civilians by British and American troops.

The film reveals a repeated and widespread failure on the part of mainstream television media to objectively scrutinise or distance itself from governments’ official line or indeed propaganda. A glaring example of this is highlighted by the reporting of government claims that Iraq possessed WMDs prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In probing interviews Pilger holds Fran Unsworth, the BBC Head of Newsgathering, and David Mannion, Editor-in-Chief of ITV News, to account. Pilger raises a pertinent question with Unsworth. He inquires how it is decided which ‘voices’ will gain air time and if so how much, how often and at what times of the day.

Pilger uncovers the fact that one US journalist had personally verified that there were no weapons of mass destruction at any of the sites the US government claimed there were, but despite this his story was ignored by the mainstream media.

CBS news anchor Dan Rather makes the astonishing admission to Pilger that if journalists had been doing their job and tried to establish the truth, rather than merely relying on official briefings, the Iraq war might never have happened.

The War You Don’t See is ambitious in its scope. It also assesses the role embedded journalists have and to what extent their perspective is compromised by the military. It looks at the part played by independent journalists and the obstacles they face that too often prevent them getting the truth to the public.

Latterly the film explores the function of whistleblowers such as Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and former senior British Foreign Office official Carne Ross and the media reporting of the hostilities between the Palestinians and Israelis.

But it concludes on a burning question: Why has the media been so complicit in keeping the public in the dark and what pressures have been brought to bear on it?

La Zona is a gated community in Mexico City, where the wealthy residents are surrounded by walls and surveillance systems to protect themselves from the violence of the outside world. When three youths break into La Zona, a violent crime ensues, leaving four corpses: a resident, a security guard and two of the youths.

When the residents discover that one of the youths is still inside La Zona, they decide to enact vigilante justice and organise armed militias to search for him. Meanwhile, young Alejandro (Daniel Tovar) has a big decision to make when he finds 16-year-old Miguel (Alan Chavez) hiding in his basement.

La Zona feels like it’s set in a future that’s literally minutes away – we already have both gated communities and ever-present CCTV cameras, so it’s not hard to imagine what would happen if everyone went a little Lord of the Flies. The film is also keenly aware that mob mentality can be a terrifying thing, though there are other, equally shocking moments, such as when the ostensible hero (or at least, a character who represents our only hope for justice) suddenly punches one of the few sympathetic characters in the face.

The performances are excellent, though Maribel Verdu (who receives the equivalent of a Special Guest Star credit) is badly underused. Alan Chavez is excellent as the terrified Miguel, while Daniel Tovar is suitably ambiguous as Alejandro – when he first finds Miguel you genuinely don’t know if he’s trying to help him or setting him up.

Director Rodrigo Pla orchestrates some genuinely suspenseful scenes and has an eye for striking imagery, particularly during the sewage pipe chase scene. The film also recalls the classic 1970s paranoia movies, in that the brutality and corruption of the police force is just as sickening as the violence.

La Zona is a gripping thriller that is both suspenseful and deeply disturbing. As such, it’s definitely worth seeing, even if it’s ultimately rather depressing.

When 13-year-old Adriana (Paulina Gaitan) is kidnapped by sex traffickers in Mexico City, her streetwise brother Jorge (Cesar Ramos) embarks on a desperate mission to rescue her. After crossing the U.S.-Mexico border by stowing away in the boot of his car, Jorge meets Ray (Kevin Kline), a cop who’s on a personal mission of his own.

When Jorge convinces Ray that he’s telling the truth, the pair join forces and follow the trail all the way to New Jersey, where Adriana is due to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, Adriana forms a bond with Veronica (Alicia Bachleda), a young Polish woman who’s been tricked into the sex trade by the same gang behind her kidnapping.

German director Marco Kreuzpaintner (hand-picked by producer Roland Emmerich) maintains a decent pace throughout and orchestrates some extremely tense scenes; he also manages to suggest some pretty horrible goings-on without giving in to exploitation scenes or cliché. In addition, the film is beautifully shot, thanks to stunning cinematography by Daniel Gottschalk.

The characters are extremely well written (Jorge is by no means a typical hero – we first meet him mugging an American tourist) and the performances are superb. Kline is intriguingly cast against type (weirdly, he doesn’t appear until around 40 minutes into the film) and there’s strong support from Marco Perez, as Adriana’s captor, who’s struggling with his conscience.

Adapted from a magazine article by Peter Landesman, Jose Rivera’s script is extremely powerful, throwing an unflinching light on every stage of the sex trafficking business, while painting a pretty bleak picture as to why it’s so difficult to stop – a caption at the end quotes a State department official, essentially admitting that the problem is being ignored at a government level.

Trade is a well written and impressively acted but the documentary aspect of the movie is a little overwhelmed by the melodrama. However, the powerful message of the movie makes it worthwhile viewing.