On the eve of the main opening of the II Dominican Global Film Festival in Santo Domingo, the UASD campus in Puerto Plata is hosting the gala opening of its local edition of the Festival which will be going on until Sunday November 23.

Local authorities, officials from the Ministry of Culture in the region, CURA as well as members of the public and private sector will attend this gala event. Following the showing of El Camino, the film´s director Ishtar Yasin, an Iraqi-Chilean raised in Costa Rica, will mingle with guests at the opening.

El Camino tells the story of two Nicaraguan siblings Saslaya 12 and her brother Darío who set off for the Costa Rican border to look for their mother who emigrated to the neighboring country 8 years earlier. They travel by bus and boat from Managua to Granada, crossing a lake then a jungle.

The children confront numerous challenges on their travels as well as meet up with all manner of strange characters: a sinister puppeteer, a homeless boy and two strangely comic individuals who are lugging an antique table around with them.

A picaresque adventure of light and darkness, at moments realistic, then verging on magical realism only to turn into a sinister fairy tale in the end. At the border when they finally arrive, the children are separated and must both rewrite their own destinies.

El Camino won the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Award as well as Honorable Mention Jury Award at the Guadalajara Film Festival.

Unique Festival

In the days leading up to this event, Natasha Despotovic, General Director of the Film Festival, noted that although there are countless film festivals of different size and importance, with different themes and genres, the Dominican Global Film Festival is unique among them all for various reasons. “It is the only festival that shows films simultaneously in five cities throughout the entire country; it is the only one that takes the films to public university auditoriums and that works directly with the schools.”

Asunción Sanz, Promotion and Marketing Director of the Festival, stressed that the main goal of the festival is to be inclusive so that as many citizens as possible can participate regardless of where they are in the country. “In this spirit, we want all Dominicans to have first hand access to the protagonists of this event. We want people to see for themselves, not be told secondhand, but see for themselves, to decide and form their own opinions according to their own criteria.”