The muse of the director who died 10 years ago remembered him with emotional words, while the actress from All About My Mother received the lifetime achievement award
The giant image of Leonardo Favio completely occupies the stage of the Cine Theater Auditorium, a room that hosted the opening of the 37th edition of the Sea of Silver International Film Festival. Below, the emotion of Cecilia Roth and Graciela Borges merged into a hug that she did not want to end. The postcard was casual, but it synthesized the most genuine emotion that cinema can offer, not from its fiction but from the feeling of those who give it life.
If that hug, those tears, spread to the audience, it was not only because of the names and the history of those who were part of it. Each viewer was also gripped by the feeling that the worst was over. Those virtual editions, or the one of 2021 at half speed, in the same space but with chinstraps and “social, preventive and mandatory distancing” seemed like a bad memory. Because, although the end of the pandemic has not yet been declared, the communion that can only be found in a movie theater returned in its fullness, and with the most important film festival in Latin America as a framework.
This new edition of the show which began this Thursday, and will continue until the 13th of this month, condenses the highlights of world cinema in 500 functions and more than 180 films. And it revolves around the figure of Favio, ten years after his death.
About this tribute, which promises to dominate every day of the show, on Saturday the 5th the film Juan Moreira (1973) will be screened at the Cine Auditorium, while the Teatro Colón will be the space to recover with free admission and in 35 mm. two other essential works: The Salesman (1969) and Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf (1975). A recital that will cover the highlights of his musical production will also be held at the MAR Museum.
Graciela Borges, muse of the Mendoza director, received the first standing ovation of the night when she took over the stage to remember her partner and friend: "It's hard to talk when you didn't know you were going to talk, plus I never prepare anything because I try to speak from the best of my heart -he began while the applause continued-. I'm indeed a little tired, but sometimes I wonder: 'Why do I say that I don't want to make movies again?' I have received so much love from so many friends with whom I have filmed. But above all my beloved Favio. He made such captivating cinema, so pure. With that camera that pardoned anyone. No matter how sinister or dark she was, he always looked at her with love. That's why I'm moved, and it gives me so much joy that they come here to say: Long live the cinema”. And a new ovation, which was accompanied from the audience by Florencia Torrente, Victoria Onetto, Martín Piroyansky, Willy Lemos, and Alejandra Darín, among the many other artists who joined this new edition of the festival.
Immediately after Luciana Jury (Favio's niece) demonstrated her enormous talent in a musical segment that covered several of the honored artist's compositions, Fernando Juan Lima (festival president) and Pablo Conde (artistic director) changed the mood with a nice, unexpected and relaxed round trip on the virtues of programming. Which gave rise to the second great moment of the night: the delivery of a lifetime achievement award to Cecilia Roth.
After a tight segment of images that summed up an endless career, the actress received the award with a round of applause and, using a microphone, tried to put into words the accumulation of emotions that ran through her: “Something similar to what happened to Graciela happens to me: I never think what I'm going to say either. Because I imagine that when I go up to this place and speak in front of the eyes of the people who are in front of me, the feeling of anguish, of fainting, will pass and I will be able to say even one sentence that interprets, that resembles something of what I am. I am very moved, by what I saw and by all these people who are here, and who love cinema and life. As we believe in life, we believe in cinema, this wonderful fiction that is truer than the truth. I am so moved to have seen Favio, Luciana singing, and Graciela speaking, I feel that at this moment the only thing I can say is 'thank you'. Thank you for being here, thank you for giving me this place… Violeta Parra said it much better than I did: Thanks to life”.
This was followed by a succession of enthusiastic and laudatory speeches by the acting Vice President of the INCAA Presidency, Nicolás Batlle; the president of the Cultural Institute of the Province of Buenos Aires, Florencia Saintout; the executive director of ANSES, Fernanda Raverta; and the Minister of Culture of the Nation, Tristan Bauer, among others.
When the fervor began to wane, both on stage and below, Gabriela Radice, the host of the ceremony, announced that it was time to draw the curtain, and Breathless (1960) began, the film by Jean-Luc Godard that closed the night; or rather, the kickoff for ten days of celebration at the cinema. As Favio himself once synthesized in a phrase that resonated with each of those present, the beginning of a day of: “Passion, poetry and memory”.
