BAFICI wakeup call

Yesterday, When I Was Young
By Julio Nakamurakare / Herald staff
Forced to put it in more formal terms, it could be said that the 13th edition of BAFICI (Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Films) presents a dichotomy based on the quality-audience dissonance of its programme. When BAFICI took off more than a decade ago, it was cause for celebration on all fronts: cinephiles, artists, producers, film students, all could benefit from BAFICI's highly original and unusual selection, otherwise unavailable even in the cultural capitals of the world. 
BAFICI came into being at the right time and the right place: Argentina was the nascent cradle of a new generation of filmmakers who, unlike their predecessors, did not learn by doing, but instead pursued academic studies which resulted in a considerable number of talented screenwriters, producers, directors, technical crew, all highly qualified to fill in positions at new companies with a fresh perspective on the kind of cinema they wanted to produce, and fully aware of the void that needed to be filled. 
There is a general consensus that and Israel Adrián Caetano-Bruno Stagnaro's Pizza birra faso (1997) is to be credited with spearheading the so-called New Argentine Cinema. Why “New,” when Argentina, unlike other South American nations, once had a thriving film industry and even its own Golden Age? Why, when talented directors like Leopoldo Torre Nilson and Leonardo Favio broke away from established paradigms and came out with unprecedented visions – in content and form – of the reality that cinema is expected to reflect? In an intelligent compilation of film analysis compiled by the late film critic and historian Claudio España, the point was made that, during the last military dictatorship, the Argentine film industry was forced to churn out inconsequential and blatantly commercial products which audiences could never relate to. After the reinstatement of democracy in 1983, the process was reversed: films like Pino Solanas' El exilio de Gardel or Luis Puenzo's La historia oficial dared to break new ground and to explore painfully suppressed issues like political exile and the need to look back on the recent past. But the void was still there, and it was no coincidence that film schools sprang up and outplaced other programmes, such as Communication Studies, which had thrived in the 80s. By the mid and late 90s, a new generation of filmmakers was ready to express itself. 
New Argentine Cinema is generally associated with new paradigms and dictums regarding subject matter, themes, and formal approach to textual and visual narrative. I'd dare say that Rejtman's Silvia Prieto embodied all or almost all of the elements that would characterize later New Argentine Cinema productions. With a sparse narrative that did not follow a linear, sequential narrative, Silvia Prieto heralded everything that was to come in Argentina's filmmaking. The word “industry” may be only used randomly here, for certain samples of this “Movement” met with critical and audience success, while others, in spite of their artistic achievements, sank into oblivion. 
DEAD RINGERS. BAFICI and “New Argentine Cinema” share the same inception date, and a mutually enriching and beneficial relationship, for one could not be without the other. In its first editions, BAFICI was an eagerly-awaited cultural beacon on the international scene, due to a powerful combination of content, programming, and circumstances. 
But ten years, in the 21st Century, fly by at lightning speed. The new modes of production and exhibition have changed so fast that the expression “audiovisual democracy” is no longer utopyan. Before there was BAFICI, there was no outlet for indie productions and no forums of discussion, no new launching pads, no new ways to reflect the fast evolving technological developments. Only a few years back, we looked with envy at the few lucky fellows who had access to broadband Internet and, let's face it, audiovisual content downloads. Availability, or lack of, played a key role in the success of a festival like BAFICI, so rich in cultural diversity, so vast in its range of selections. 
The 13th edition of BAFICI overcomes this hurdle by providing as ample a panorama of indie and peripheral cinematographies as in previous years, which means that it is not the programmers' fault if there is a hovering sensation of... disenchantment? But maybe the expression “lack of connection” is more appropriate. 
BAFICI's detractors have always underlined its self-imposed “ghetto” nature, which “alienates” most viewers from the festival's sophisticated offerings. Others, in similarly fundamentalist manner, claimed BAFICI was indeed like an island in a miasma of self-replicating formulas in the mainstream film industry. 
From where we stand now, the point may have shifted a bit, with a tilt towards an equilibrium of sorts between art and audience reception. However, true artists need not fend themselves off from the masses. On the contrary, they must reach out and speak to them in terms they can understand, come to grips with and, ultimately, rejoice over. 
BAFICI, for incurable cinephiles, has always been pure bliss. But there's a little something out there, some expanding controversy, that it's time to bring it closer, if not to the people at its very foundations of the festival, at least to filmgoers whose modes of viewing and consuming audiovisual products has radically changed. 
Filmmakers certainly have the right, which they fully exercise, to make movies not directed at mass audiences. But entrenching themselves behind trendy, artsy repetition is no good for anyone.