Ten years of INVASION

Ten years have passed since the first edition. In 2014, Argentine culture — with cinema as its starting point — burst into Berlin for the first time, for a whole month, in cinemas and cultural spaces. With every edition that followed the festival took new shapes, changing houses and skins. After the pandemic we left the online format behind and returned to the kind of encounter we like best: in person, in the cinema, face to face.

On 31 May, together with the Instituto Cervantes, Latinale and Grandfilm, we presented the German preview of Laura Citarella's third feature “Trenque Lauquen” at the Passage Kino. Supported by the Berlinale World Cinema Fund, the film celebrates the joy of storytelling, drawing on genres as diverse as detective novel, love story, film noir and mystery drama. Citarella, lead actor and producer Ezequiel Pierri and co-producer and German distributor Stefan Butzmühlen joined us at the cinema.

On 19 August the Humboldt Forum hosted the Berlin cinema premiere — for the first time open-air — of Santiago Mitre's “Argentina, 1985” with Ricardo Darín and Peter Lanzani, nominated for an Oscar that year. The film is inspired by the true story of prosecutor Julio Strassera, Luis Moreno Ocampo and their young legal team who dared to indict the leaders of Argentina's last military dictatorship. Philosopher Darío Sztajnszrajber gave an introductory talk on cinema and democracy, in Spanish with simultaneous translation into English. The screening was part of the series “Box Office Around the World”.