• EL secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes), the latest film from Argentine Juan José Campanella, with well-known actors Ricardo Darín, Guillermo, Francella, and Soledad Villamil in the leading roles, has been chosen to open the 31st International Festival of New Latin American Cinema. It comes to Havana with many guarantees, among them the fact that the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences of Argentina has selected it to compete for a place in the Oscars.

The film has been a total success in Argentina itself, another extremely important aspect, which is that films from the region find distribution and presence on the screens and their natural spectators. The Secret in Their Eyes has been at the point of breaking the historic record of more than two million viewers garnered in 1984 by the iconic film Camila, by María Luisa Bemberg, with Susú Pecoraro.

In addition to being a director, Campanella has been the scriptwriter of his four best-known films: El mismo amor, la misma lluvia, El hijo de la novia (nominated for an Oscar in 2001 in Best Foreign Language Film), Luna de Avellaneda, and now The Secret in Their Eyes.

The new movie, in competition for the Havana Festival Coral Prize, relates the story of a recently retired man, Benjamin Chaporro, who after working all his life as an employee in a criminal court, decides to write a novel, a thriller set in Buenos Aires in 1974, based on a real event of which he was witness and protagonist. In appearance, it is the story of a murder.

Through that story, Juan José Campanella talks about the roads taken by Argentine society, of the impunity of the repression in the 70s, the re-composition of the justice system and the democracy of recent years.

Another Argentine film, showing outside of the competition, and on its world premiere, is the documentary Che: The New Man, by the eminent director Tristán Bauer, which, as Alfredo Guevara, founder of ICAIC and the Festival, has said, is an attempt to show a more human side of the guerrilla.

In a press conference, the Festival president affirmed that the documentary presents unedited footage of the personal and amorous life of Che guarded by his widow, Aleida March, and, he stressed, "those of us who were close to Che as friends know that Che was what he was, the demanding – at times acerbic guerrilla, although that is never said – but at the same time a man of infinite humanity."

Tristán Bauer worked on his project for more than 10 years and had access to secret archives of the Bolivian army – which executed Che in October 1967 – and those from the Che Guevara Studies Center in Cuba.

His seven films include the multi-prized Iluminados por el fuego (2005), which opened the Havana Festival in 2006, and the medium-length film Evita, una tumba sin paz (1997).

Likewise outside of the competition is the new film from Miguel Littin, Dawson Isla 10, which is to represent Chile in the quest for nominations to the U.S. and Spanish Academies; in other words, the Oscar and the Goya.

With Benjamín Vicuña in the central role, the film narrates real events that took place after the Pinochet coup, when President Salvador Allende’s collaborators were arrested and exiled to a Pacific island one hundred kilometers from the continent.

Dawson Isla 10 is based on the autobiographical account of Sergio Bitar, who was part of the group of high-ranking constitutional officials interned in that concentration camp surrounded by sea, having been Allende’s minister of mining (and now minister of public works with the current president, Michelle Bachelet).

Miguel Littín is a very well-known director, a founder member of the New Latin American Cinema, the winner of many prizes for films such as La viuda de Montiel and El recurso del método. He was nominated for an Oscar in 1976 and in 1983 for Best Foreign Language Film, for Actas de Marusia and Alsino y el cóndor, respectively. His cinematic career began in 1969, with El Chacal de Nahueltoro, a film that had an impact both in box-office and socio-political terms.

He was forced to go into exile in 1973, in the wake of the coup d’état and the establishment of the Pinochet dictatorship, living first in Mexico and then in Spain. In 1985 he was able to return clandestinely to Chile and make a bold film project on his country’s political reality, Acta general de Chile. When he returned to Spain and finished his film, Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel García Márquez proposed that he should write a book about it, published as Las aventuras de Miguel Littín clandestino en Chile.

He returned to Latin American issues with Sandino in 1991, directed Los náufragos in 1994, and in 2000, took up the popular epic style once more with Tierra del fuego.

Francis Ford Coppola, who has previously attended the Havana Festival, has now sent his film Tetro, filmed in Argentina, considered a new journey by the director of The Godfather on his habitual theme of the family as a reduced version of society with all its conflicts and reconciliations.

The movie, filmed in black and white, recounts the story of two brothers separated from each other for years, who meet up again in Buenos Aires in order to face up to a secret that will change their relationship for ever.

The cast is impressive: Vincent Gallo, debut actor Alden Ehrenreich, Spaniards Maribel Verdú and Carmen Maura, Austrian Klaus Maria Brandauer and Argentines Rodrigo de la Serna, Leticia Brédice and Mike Amigorena.

It should be said that when Tetro was shown in Cannes, the public who filled the theater liked it but it didn’t convince all the critics, who pointed to a script that went off into incidentals, reaching 2:07 hours, uneven acting and certain totally gratuitous choreographed landscapes.

It would seem that the most convincing of all the actors is Spaniard Maribel Verdú, who knows how to reach out to spectators in her painful figure of the sacrificed lover of the central character, Tetro, acted by Vincent Gallo.

Coppola, of The Godfather trilogy and Dracula, recently celebrated his 70th birthday and his career includes as many successes as failures. Tetro is his first film based on an original story since The Conversation, which won him his first Palme d’Or in Cannes; the second was Apocalypse Now 30 years ago.

There is more on Dracula. The festival is to offer a special showing of George Melford’s Dracula, the Latinized version of the movie filmed in 1931 by Tod Browning, with Bela Lugosi in the lead role.

Alfredo Guevara explained that this version was discovered in the vaults of the Cinemateca de Cuba and that he considered it better than the original.

He announced that the world premiere of the soundtrack score of the Latino Dracula, is to be performed live by its composer, guitarist Gary Lucas.