Cine Campesino: A Documentary Film (2002)


Production and screenplay: Tomas F. Crowder-Taraborrelli

Cine Campesino is a Travelling film festival that has done over 110 film festivals in rural Honduras. It was first organized in 2002, in a small town called El Pital. This documentary was made of that event. In 2003 Ronald Reinds made it possible that Cine Campesino became mobile.


Cine Campesino is a project set up by Un Mundo, a small NGO that operates in the valley of the river Cangrejal on the north coast of Honduras. It initated with a film festival in 2002 that lasted 3 days. After the second edition, Cine Campesino underwent a large change and got mobile and started giving free film festivals in rural Honduran comunities. Cine Campesino left Un Mundo during the course of 2004 to join Arte Acción Copán Ruinas.

Cine Campesino:  video installation
Cine Campesino shows Spanish spoken Latin American movies with social themes primarily in mountain villages in Honduras that have no access to electricity, cable or a video store. This means that some 90% of villages would be eligible for a Cine Campesino Film Festival. The way these are done is as follows; we make contact with a local or a Peace Corps Volunteer who has a cell phone or who can use the internet, we discuss a date that suits us both, we send them the folder “How to organize a Film Festival in YOUR Comunity” and then we have night of cine!

Four years and 111 film festivals later, we have completed a documentaty on people who have never seen a movie before in their lives. This is a homage to Por Primera Vez, a Cuban documentary from 1967 with the same theme. The documentary has been shown on the Noordelijk Film Festival and the Sidney Latin American Film Festival and will be screened on a number of other film festivals throughout the world; most notably the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the International Documantary Film Festival Amsterdam.


Cine Campesino is still on the road, run by Hondurans but without proper wheels. A documentary made by Arte Acción Copán Ruinas on the cultural remains of the Maya comunity in the Copán region is now shown in every town Cine Campesino visits. Here´s a a few images of a screening in Nueva Esperanza, Copán. If you want to volunteer for Cine Campesino, you need to have an Audiovisual background and speak some Spanish.


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