Locarno’s Open Doors: Paz Encina, Ernesto Bautista Triumph at Awards Ceremony as Showcase Preps 2025-28 Focus on Africa
variety.comJohn Hopewell Chief International Correspondent LOCARNO, Switzerland — Paraguay’s Paz Encina (“Eami”) and three first time fiction feature directors – El Salvador’s Enrique Bautista, Cuba’s Rosa María Rodríguez Pupo, Peru’s Fernando Mendoza – split the big prize on offer at this year’s Locarno Open Doors with Encina and Bautista taking the lion’s share of a CHF50,000 ($58,000) cash prize.
The grant was sponsored by Visions Sud Est and the City of Bellinzona. Its winners – Encina’s “The Unique Time,” Bautista’s “Salvation,” Rodriguez’s “Her Lightness” and Mendoza’s “The Return of the Last Mochica Warrior” – were announced Tuesday at the Swiss Festival as Open Doors’ arresting three-year focus on smaller markets in Latin America and the Caribbean came to a close.
Open Doors main partner, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), announced Monday that the co-production and talent development program will now throw its focus for the next four years on underrepresented communities in Africa.
Some Open Doors 2024 winners are a testament to the rise of genre blending social-issue cinema in Latin America. El Salvador’s “Salvation,” which also scored a BR Lab Award, is “a thriller with a found-footage horror spirit,” says Bautista, as a hospital nurse realizes that an aged dying patient is the same man who raped her in El Salvador’s Civil War.
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