“Uruguay has a lot of talent and potential to create.”

“In Uruguay, there is a lot of talent and scope for creation,” said Argentine Claudia Bertolino, director of the production company Amashort, who recently participated in Uruguay in a business round with local production companies organized by the investment and export promotion agency Uruguay XXI and DocMontevideo.

Bertolino recently sold the rights to the Uruguayan documentary Dreaming Robots to a European airline. “This has an incredible diffusion because it goes all over the world. I have much faith in Soñar Robots; it attracts attention because it’s about children who do robotics in the Uruguayan interior and win an international contest,” he said.

“In Argentina, there are many distributors, but in Uruguay, there is much room to do things,” added Bertolino, who works in the marketing of documentaries, animated series, and short films and has been doing so for some time now with Uruguayan productions.

Last year, in addition to Dreaming Robots, it selected Tonga, the 34th oriental film, for its catalog. “They are films that represent Uruguay very well and tell how this country goes out into the world,” she commented on the two productions.

The Argentine also saw exceptional sales possibilities in the documentary El viento nos dejará by Gabinete Films, which deals with the tornado that hit the Uruguayan city of Dolores in 2016.

The associate programmer of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), María Campaña Ramia, said about the Uruguayan productions in general that “there is always an intimate and self-reflective question; they are more mellow films that incorporate the climate and the landscape in an exciting way.”

Business round between Uruguayan production companies and foreign agencies

Bertolino and Campaña Ramia were in Uruguay to participate in a business round with the Uruguayan audiovisual sector. They were joined by representatives of other important international distributors and marketers of documentaries, short films, and feature films, such as Canal Encuentro (Argentina), TAL (Argentina), Canal Curta (Brazil), TV Brasil (Brazil), Canal Capital (Colombia), Docu (Chile), The New York Times Op-Docs (United States), Sundance Film Institute (United States).

The activity sought to promote the marketing and distribution of Uruguayan unitaries and documentary series. Nine Uruguayan production companies were selected for the meeting and presented up to two documentaries or series in person before representatives of foreign television stations and sales agencies.

The production companies presented were Bocacha Films with the documentaries Dizer Adeus and Alter; Byobu with the documentary Ida Vitale; Coral Cine with a documentary on sculptor Pablo Atchugarry; Cordón Films with two documentaries, Carmín and Mala reputación, on gender and social issues; Gabinete Films with the documentaries La nieve entre los dos and El viento nos dejará, on social and environmental problems; Gen- Centro de Artes y Ciencias with the documentary Soñar Robots, which deals with the Ceibal educational program that Uruguay is developing with digital technologies; Hoppe Films with the film El retrato de mi padre; Passaparola Films with a production on a mural by Joaquín Torres García and another documentary on Uruguayan musical sensitivity; and We Cook Films, with the documentaries Un viaje por vivir and Otra cosecha. You can see the productions presented and their teasers by clicking here.

Hoppe Films’ “El retrato de mi padre” (My Father’s Portrait) aroused Campaña Ramia’s interest. “It is formally very rigorous, well worked and conceptualized from the aesthetic and plastic point of view, with a very intimate connection,” said the programmer about the production.

“Montevideo is a great meeting hub because many times we Latin Americans have to go through Europe to meet or validate ourselves, and DocMontevideo fulfills this function of being able to get to know projects without having to go so far away. Here I met very important films for IDFA and even for me as a programmer. And it is no longer a mere professional contact; one ends up making friends. I love this country,” she added.

About the business round, Bertolino commented that “there is a great interest in Uruguayan films, and many of them have won important awards and have been selected for major festivals, which makes sales much easier."