4 days at the Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre Festival 2016

The Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre, or BARS, is not like the Festivals we are used to attend in Europe and that are mostly working on subventions. This one has started 17 years ago as a group of friends wanting to show low-budget movies made by other friends, and has kept the same spirit over the years even though it now features an International competitions, shows movies from all over the world and welcomes guests like the Italian director Ruggero Deodato this year.
JoRafCinema was glad to spend a couple of days there and here is a report on what it felt like.

Snapshot of the mood in front of the main venue.

I got organized pretty late to go to the Festival but was quickly excited about it as you can feel in my preview. The spirit of the Festival promised to be good by looking at its website, and the programming was dense, varied and original compared to European Festivals, although I could complain that the programme arrived very late (about 10 days before opening) which made it hard to organize one's trip according to the movies or the presence of Ruggero Deodato for example.

The coolest accreditation design.

From the very first day the Staff was always extremely helpful in providing information about the projections, tickets, opening hours, Press benefits... In particular their could organize for me an interview with Ariana Bouzón, producer of the Festival for nine years and that gave an interesting insight on the past, present and future of this Festival like no other.

The Festival venue is the Lavalle Multiplex, right at the heart of the shopping area in Buenos Aires where you cannot starve or die of thirst. Movies are scheduled in the late afternoon and evening which gives the visitors time to roam around the city in the morning to discover its beauties: the Microcentro, San Termo, the Harbor and Costanera Sud Ecological Reserve, Recoleta...

BARS memorabilia for sale.

As already mentioned the programming is original even in the International competition, but unfortunately I was disappointed by the movies I could see (all reviews to be found under this link). I struggled to stay awake through the promising Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies, Origin, or even The Entity. The documentary Fantasticozzi was interesting, Daylight's End well-done if not original and the European The Windmill Massacre was good, but the only movie I saw that really showed quality was the Polono-American post-apocalyptic Drama Embers. Maybe it was the selection, or maybe just a bad year for the Genre after all the good things we saw in Gérardmer in January.

Showing off for the camera while introducing a movie, that's the BARS spirit!

Across all categories I was a bit frustrated with my Spanish level insufficient to watch Karate Kill (Japanese with Spanish sub-titles), the American and British movies in the retrospective, in particular The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (dubbed in Spanish) or any of the local productions like El dia que prohibieron el asado or La Valija de Benavidez showed without any sub-titles. This casts a shadow on the "International" name of the Festival although I understand that having all movies accessible to non-Spanish speakers would be too much of an effort for a very small public. And watching The Windmill Massacre in Dutch with Spanish sub-titles gave me hope that in fact I could have followed those other movies, and motivation to improve my level within a year to overcome this frustration in 2017.
In fact it seemed like I was the only non-Porteño (Buenos Aires inhabitant) over there, which increased the feeling of participating to a Festival organized between friends. The audience was very fitting: most of them wore T-shirt with movie or rock-band references, many of them with original design that I had never seen before. A few others wore costumes, and even though I didn't know anybody I had the feeling of a big family including some know actors like Susana Beltran (see picture below).

Actress Susana Beltran from the 1969 sexploitation La Venganza del Sexo surrounded by costumed tributes to the movie.

Finally on the last Saturday of the Festival I couldn't miss the Closing Ceremony which turned out to be as good-natured as the Festival itself, with its two horrific costumed not really professional orators delivering one after the other prices to movies which had nobody to receive them except for the Argentinian ones of course, under thunders of applause. The whole palmares can be found here.
I found the ceremony well organized with video extracts for each category, and the presentation of amateur shorts produced during the Festival, but a bit lengthy and with an exaggerated amount of forced applause rewarding an exaggerated amount of awards. I think the Festival would gain in reducing that to a more meaningful minimum.

The projection room for the Closing ceremony, the cool design of the awards and the attribution of prices to the Argentinian La Valija de Benavidez.

Well, all-in-all I was extremely pleased to participate to this Festival, and they are so rare in South America that I am very likely to attend its next edition or its Mendoza spin-off in July.

See you next year Rojo Sangre!