Sugar Curtain Latest Fest Acquisition

Word just trickled over the Reeler HQ transom that First Run/Icarus Films snagged North American rights to Camila Guzmán Urzúa's debut The Sugar Curtain, which premiered April 27 in Tribeca's world doc competition.

In his Screening Room review of the film, Reeler critic Vadim Rizov offered shrugging approval: "Urzua -- who moved with her family to Cuba in the '70s from Chile and then left in 1990 -- finds person after person who compares the good old days to the current state of things, and concludes that an economy based around tourism and money sent from abroad by relatives might not be in the best shape to create a socialist utopia. Snark aside, Urzua's impulse to create a lyrical elegy for the past clashes mightily with attempts at cogent political analysis: the result is a film that hamhandedly focuses on images of decaying playground to symbolize all that's been lost. Footage of schoolchildren yelling 'We shall be like Che!' to start off their school day almost makes up for it, but not quite."

A just-arrived press release also notes that Curtain will screen at the San Francisco Film Festival as planned starting May 6 before moving on to a theatrical release this summer.

Posted at May 2, 2007 12:31 PM