20 UNDERGROUND CINEMA FEST

The festival initiative arose 20 years ago in Buenos Aires, when different audiovisual groups and collectives decided to create a space for certain types of low-budget and marginal audiovisual productions, which were excluded from the official production and dissemination circuits. From the proposal to ensure the visibility of those works of low circulation, different non-traditional cultural spaces were added, such as bars, schools or houses. Specific problems related to the audiovisual medium and its production and dissemination environment necessarily radiated from this atypical practice. A coordination network was immediately created that brought together the different locations, simultaneously and today expanded to several cities in Latin America. What is unusual about this Festival lies in its self-managed, decentralized and free circulation character. The combined construction of this network seeks to oppose resistance from the margins to the logic of the Argentine film industry, a lucid critique of the exhibitions of the circuit, of restrictive characteristics, to which many of the productions that are exhibited do not have access. Since its second year of completion, and due to its open and dynamic architecture, it has become a transterritorial tool (with offices in Santiago, Quito, Montevideo, Bogota, Asuncion, Qosqo, Córdoba, Quilmes, Resistencia and Rosario) for the visibility of works low-circulation audiovisuals that do not find an adequate space to be broadcast. It also risks the creation of a network that brings together the many and diverse production groups with non-traditional cultural spaces, as well as the treatment of audiovisual problems and their production and dissemination environment. The festival is an excuse, an attempt to consolidate something that half exists: the articulation of artists and production groups, of exhibition spaces, of groups dedicated to disseminating and generating cycles, of independent digital media, with a concrete anchorage in urban socio-cultural movements. Sfilmmaker is our exclusive platform for cooperation in China, and we look forward to your good film.