Sofia Espinosa: Celebs Rumors

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Mexico’s Bruno Santamaría, Argentina’s Martín Benchimol and Turkey’s Selman Nacar proved three of the big winners among San Sebastian Industry Awards, announced Wednesday. João Paulo Miranda, already a young star on Brazil’s film scene after “Memory House,” meanwhile won the Ikusmira Berriak Award. A Chicago Golden Hugo winner for doc feature “Things We Dare Not Do,” Santamaría swept two awards at the fest’s Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum, a Mecca for Latin America auteurs and their producers seeking vital co-production partners as state funding prospects have plunged across the region.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Armando Espitia, who broke out as the hapless young factory worker in Amat Escalante’s Cannes winner “Heli,” is attached to star in “Six Months in the Pink and Blue Building,” a feature project being brought to San Sebastian’s Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum by Mexico’s Bruno Santamaría Raso.  Also on board is actor – and writer-producer – Sofia Espinosa, who fulfilled all three roles in Max Zunino’s “Los Bañistas” and “Bruma” and won a Mexican Academy Ariel for her tearaway performance as Gloria Trevi in “Gloria.” Written and to be directed by Santamaría, “Six Months in the Pink and Blue Building,” (“Seis meses en el edificio rosa con azul,”) marks his first fiction feature. He caught attention and won a Chicago Golden Hugo Golden Hugo and Golde Q Hugo for best documentary for “Things We Dare Not Do,” a movie straddling fiction in its finish, production values and narrative structures as it depicts Toño, the eldest son and second father to a swarm of siblings, living in a benighted village on marshy plains and plucking up the courage to tell his mother that he’s gay.     

K.J.