The Costa Rica Film Festival kicks off next week with a program featuring major festival hits such as Carla Simón’s “Romería,” Bi Gan’s “Resurrection,” Diego Céspedes’s “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,” Ulrike Ottinger’s Isabelle Huppert-starring “The Blood Countess” and Lucrecia Martel’s “Landmarks.” The 14th edition, taking place in San Jose between July 23 and August 1, will open with Allan Deberton’s Berlin-winning “Gugu’s World.”
Titles selected for the festival’s primary competitive strand, the Central American and Caribbean Feature Film Competition, include Costa Rican talent such as Hernán Jiménez with “Abril,” Kim Torres’s with “Si no ardemos cómo iluminar la noche” and Wainer Méndez Solano with “Dama de las mil máscaras.” The competition also features films from Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Panamá and Puerto Rico, including Vanessa Batista’s “Calle Cuba” and “Niñas Escarlata,” by Paula Cury.
This year’s festival theme is “Cinema That Unites Us,” reaffirming the event’s commitment to tending to local communities. Amongst the novelties in the program is a dedicated Afro-Caribbean section, an initiative the festival has described as “a necessary space for visibility, inclusion, and intercultural dialogue with Afro-descendant communities, whose stories and perspectives profoundly enrich our cinematic landscape.”
