LIFFY 2023 Brings the Year’s Best Spanish-Language Cinema to Yale and to New Haven

The Latino & Iberian Film Festival at Yale (LIFFY) celebrated its fourteenth edition Oct. 30-Nov. 5, with in-person screenings of more than 45 films from 17 different countries at various locations throughout campus. An energetic mixture of Yale students, professors, and cinephiles from New Haven attended the free film screenings and engaged in conversations with more than twenty invited directors and actors.

“I am thrilled to have completed another successful year of the Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale!  This year we had a larger audience than expected and ran out of our 300 printed programs by day 4 of the 7 day festival.  That’s a good problem to have!” said LIFFY executive director Margherita Tortora. “I am very grateful to all those that made LIFFY 2023 possible.”

The festival kicked off at Yale Law School with an exhibition of the iconic work of Argentine photojournalist Eduardo Longoni—the subject of one of the festival’s documentaries, Una mirada honesta—followed by a discussion with the artist, moderated by Santiago Carbajal ’24 LLM.

As part of the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS) community engagement programming, LIFFY 2023 hosted more than 300 local students at two screenings of Pablo Chea’s Dominican film Croma Kid, “a story about unlocking the power of memories and how the moments we share as a family live on within us forever.”

After the closing screening, the jury—composed of the award-winning producer and director Greta Schiller, writer and director Antonio Tibaldi, and writer and producer Eva Zelig—announced the 2023 edition winners: Memento Morí (Colombia) by Fernando López Cardona was awarded the Best Fiction Feature Film Prize. Best Documentary Feature was awarded to Berta soy yo (Honduras), a film directed by Katia Lara about Berta Cáceres, the Honduran social and environmental activist who was assassinated in 2016. Una mirada honesta (Argentina), directed by Santiago Nacif Cabrera and Roberto Persano, won the Best Direction award.

The festival concluded with a reception cohosted by Margherita Tortora and Elvis Tuesta, the Consul General of Peru in Hartford, featuring a delicious Peruvian meal from Cevichería Julius generously provided by the Consulate of Peru in Hartford, Connecticut.

“I very much appreciate our talented, committed filmmakers for believing in our festival. We had many Q&A’s after the screenings, and most of the filmmakers paid their own way to be here with us. Their support has made LIFFY one of the very few internationally IMDb-recognized film festivals at a university,” Tortora said. “As a born-and-raised New Havener, I am proud to give back to my community and to have been able to organize a real film festival at Yale for the past 14 years!”