aluCine began in 1992 as the Southern Currents Film & Video Collective. 1993, the collective hosted the first Latin Short Film Festival of Canada. aluCine has grown from this seed and developed into an artistic project that creates platforms of communication aimed at fostering a critical discourse among film/video makers, media artists, curators and audiences in Canada, Latin America and the world through screenings, touring exhibitions, installations, performances, artist talks and workshops.

This year we continue to follow our mandate to program transnational and wide-ranging multidirectional new works, screening over 40 films and videos in fiction, experimental, documentary and animation from all over Latin America.

The works that aluCine presents are complex and multifaceted; aluCine is a festival always in a transcultural-flux, informed by an artistic cultural environment, which is constantly re-defining itself. Our programming reflects the 'transgenric' state of experimental film and video culture; a culture that has become decentralized, a culture of discoverable peripheries without specific ownership or dominant definition; a culture that is starting to float between North and Global South, breaking down the barriers imposed by economic needs and cultural-political domination designed to turn the world into a single place.

Be it from Cairo, Lebanon, Buenos Aires, Cali or Toronto, the merging of new technologies and art takes place mostly in the fields of digital video production, video installation and electronic sound. aluCine acknowledges that the difference of access to the means of production, as a result of poverty and limited training, creates technical and qualitative disparities between works produced across the globe. An independent audiovisual production is nonetheless thriving in Latin America and countries from the Global South and the programming acknowledges this important transformation in independent experimental culture.

In this light, and in an effort to promote a healthy exchange designed to strengthen the communication links between film and video organizations and artists from Latin America and Canada. In this spirit we recognize that in an epoch of ubiquitous movement, advanced communication, media technology and ecological survival, aesthetic, socio-political and cultural dialogues based on the mutual ex- change of independent knowledge and talent are particularly relevant.


We would like to thank all of the artists and participants, our international guests, guest curators, organizations, aluCine's board and staff and in particular our funders, supporters, co-presenters, volunteers and you, our audience.

ABOUT SINARA ROZO

Sinara Rozo is a Toronto based arts administrator, a proud mother and an educator. She co-founded “Crossing Borders/Cruzando Fronteras”: the non for-profit organization that hosts aluCine today.  She worked in the festival from its origins through 2005, and returned in 2007 after taking a leave of absence to pursue her Masters degree (MFA Film) at York University. While at York, Rozo worked as a Graduate Assistant coordinating The Independents Film Series for the Film Department. In recent years, Sinara has deepened her investment in media arts administration by taking part in several advisory committees for the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Her increased exposure in the national and international media arts community continues to inspire and foster new initiatives.  For the past year, Sinara has been in charge of all year-round activities, including programming, Board development, Programming Committee selection, community out reach, education programs, and grants and reports writing.