Presented by Palace Cinemas James Street, the Cine Latino Film Festival, one of Australia’s largest festivals of Latin American cinema, has announced the full 2018 program which features an assortment of the latest films from across Central and South America including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Paraguay.

Cine Latino has announced that comedian Iván Aristeguieta will be this year’s Festival Ambassador. Iván turned his hand to comedy after a successful career as a brew master and food technologist in his homeland of Venezuela. Since migrating to Australia in 2012, Iván has quickly made a name for himself on the comedy festival circuit in Australia and overseas.

With 26 features including a spotlight of new films from Argentina, a Cuban retrospective, three documentaries and 18 Australian premieres, this year’s Cine Latino Film Festival is planned to be a fiesta of the sights, sounds and stories of Latin America, and opens with with one of the most eagerly anticipated films of the year, Alfonso Cuarón’s ROMA. The most personal project to date from Academy Award-winning director and writer Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, Y Tu Mamá También), ROMA follows Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a young domestic worker for a family in the middle-class neighbourhood of Roma in Mexico City. Delivering an artful love letter to the women who raised him, Cuarón draws on his own childhood to create a vivid and emotional portrait of domestic strife and social hierarchy amidst political turmoil of the 1970s. ROMA won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and has been selected to represent Mexico in the upcoming Oscars and Spanish Goya awards. The Opening Night gala screening of ROMA will be followed by a Latin American feast of food, drinks and entertainment.

The festival takes place nationally from mid-November and will arrive in Brisbane on 21 November until 2 December.

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