In his opening remarks, Mr. Guevara underscored the presence of “new weapons, new arms that were not better but legitimate. A new breed of young filmmakers will embark on a trip toward the intellectual and political stardom of those writers and artists of ours that for centuries (…) worked like wise men and goldsmiths to carve the Americas, unearthing its profound unity, the wonders of its diversity, the originality of its history…”

The harbinger of the Havana film event came at the Viña del Mar Movie Festival between 1967 and 1969, summoned by Chilean producer Aldo Francia and his associates, and whose opening edition panned out to be the first-ever meeting of Latin American independent filmmakers, a sign of the times that wanted to claim a new reality by staying away from the guidelines of the more commercial-driven cinematography.

The New Cinema had been born since the mid 1950s when documentaries and feature presentations teeming with social and political commitments began to pop up all across Latin America and the Caribbean. Films like Forty Degrees, by Brazilian director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Cuban producer Julio Garcia Espinosa's Megano, and the works of the Santa Fe Documentary School, headed by Argentina's Fernando Birri, were some of the standouts at the time.

The 1960s, the so-called decade of wrath –as Chilean moviemaker Miguel Littin once put it- provided the perfect framework for that pluralistic and critical vision. That movement was supported by such boldface names as Glauber Rocha and other advocates of Brazil's new cinema. In this neck of the woods, in Havana, Santiago Alvarez was already working on some of his classics, Tomas Gutierrez Alea was shooting Memories of Underdevelopment, The Twelve Chairs, A Bureaucrat's Death and many other blockbusters, while a young Humberto Solas eked out Lucia.

Chile had long since been reaping the fruits of the Filmic Institute at the Catholic University, founded in 1957. Bolivia's Jorge Sanjines –who had studied cinema at the Santiago de Chile University- was laying bare the social reality of his country, especially of the indigenous population. The flame of the new cinema was burning regardless of the critical situation imposed by the military dictatorships that ruled in Latin American with an iron grip for quite a number of years.

The Latin American Committee of Filmmakers saw the light of day in Caracas in 1974 in an effort to stand up for moviemakers in the region that were threatened by the political clout of the military. Five years later, when the movement was apparently running out of options to showcase this kind of big-screen art that had cost the lives of many producers, the city of Havana opened its movie theaters to the New Cinema and they have remained that way for the past 25 years.

THE HAVANA MOVIE FESTIVAL The unique backdrop that shaped the Havana festival, marked by an aggressive environment in which the productions of the new Latin American cinema tried to elbow their way through, turned Havana into an oasis of peace and reencounter for filmmakers from all over the region.

And even though similar events have popped up or reappeared all across Latin America and the rest of the world in recent years, it'd be impossible and ungraceful to downplay the role the Havana Film Festival has played over the past quarter of a century.

From the very first editions, a group of countries took the lead and haven't let up since then, especially in terms of quality and acceptance in the Cuban public. The trio of Brazil, Argentina and Mexico has made history from the word go. They're by far the shoo-ins of all contests and in all categories, pulling a train in which such nations as Cuba, Venezuela, Chile and Peru ride comfortably. Producers and directors from those countries have churned out box-office hits and award-winning presentations.

Names like Geraldo Sarno, Tisuka Yamasaki, Carlos Diegues, Leon Hirszman from Brazil share the spotlight of the New Cinema with a bunch of talented young moviemakers from their own turf, like Andrucha Waddington, Walter Salles, Karim Aïnouz, Jose Henrique Fonseca, Claudio Assis.

Mexico's Arturo Ripstein, Paul Leduc, Juan A. de la Riva, Felipe Cazals, Jorge Fons do their own with the likes of Luis Carlos Carrera, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu and Maryse Sistach.

Argentina's Adolfo Aristarain, Fernando “Pino” Solanas, Luis Puenzo, Juan Jose Jusid, Eliseo Subiela continue their trailblazing path, while new stars like Carlos Sorin, Lucrecia Martel, Diego Lerman, Pablo Trapero and Daniel Burman are now making names of their own.

Peruvian Francisco Lombardi and Bolivian Jorge Sanjines continue to be two giants, as well as Cuba's Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Humberto Solas and Fernando Perez, even though the island nation is still flashing the creative motivation that got cracking in the 1990s with Arturo Sotto and Enrique Alvarez first, and Humberto Padron, Pavel Giroud, Lester Hamlet, Esteban Insausti and Ian Padron later on.

However, there's one question floating in the air: how many of the ideal-esthetic concepts that begot this movement are still present in the New Latin American Cinema?

Alfredo Guevara, one of the movement's founders and top supporters of the Havana Film Festival, once told us the new cinema was born not as a limited structure or school, but rather as an “ethic, esthetic current that was intended to become a comprehensive expression of a complex reality.”

That same opinion is shared by another cofounder, Chile's Miguel Littin, who was once quoted as saying that “the New Latin America Cinema knows no frontiers, dogmas or credos; it simply feeds on the dialectics of daily life.”

Once again, armed with “new weapons, new arms that were not better but legitimate,” the cinematographic movement that saw the light of day back in the 1960s keeps on reinventing itself out of the diversity and unity of our cultures. And make no mistakes about it; the Havana International New Latin American Film Festival is a good case in point.