The 2025 Latin American Film Days in Budapest to feature a Cannes award-winning film!
The third Latin American Film Days in Budapest will take place between September 26 and 30, this time in collaboration with four embassies – the Hungarian missions of Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru – and the Uránia National Film Theatre.
The curiosities, diverse in genre, include a comedy, a time travel dramedy, a neo noir thriller and a documentary. The selection includes The Secret Agent (18), a Brazilian film that won important awards at Cannes. A creator will also be coming to the film days: director Santiago Paladines will be the guest at the screening of the Ecuadorian comedy Los Wánabis – Álmenők.
The film days will start on Friday evening with the feature film Queens, which takes place in Lima, Peru, in the 1990s. Its main characters, Aurora and Lucía, are teenagers raised by their mother, Elena. One day, Elena decides to emigrate with her daughters, but to do so, they need the signature of their father, who has been absent from their lives for years. Her appearance stirs up the emotions of all the family members.
The sensitive coming-of-age story, which debuted in the Sundance program and was recognised with the Berlinale section award, is about family, migration and change. Peruvian-Swiss director Klaudia Reynicke drew inspiration from her own experiences, as she too had to leave her homeland at a young age. On Saturday, the program will continue with the thriller The Secret Agent (18), which has so far only been seen in Hungary by viewers of the Cinefest competition program.
Brazilian star director Kleber Mendoça Filho takes his audience back to 1977. Marcelo (the stunning Wagner Moura), in his forties, is on the run from his mysterious past. He arrives in the coastal city of Recife during Carnival week, hoping to reconnect with his son. However, he soon realises that the city is far from the peaceful haven he was looking for. A series of increasingly crazy adventures begins… The secret agent was one of the biggest sensations at Cannes this year, where he won, among others, the Best Director and Best Actor awards. It will be released in theatres in Hungary in 2026, distributed by Cikro Film.
Humour will take centre stage on Sunday thanks to the film Los Wánabis – Álmenők. Beto, Juan Pedro and Diego are friends who invest all their money in a dubious business in the hope of getting rich quickly. The most watched Ecuadorian film of 2023 is a black comedy based on true events that tells the story of the crazy things people are capable of doing, especially in company, when they are promised that they can change their lives without any effort.
The film boasts several firsts: it was the first Ecuadorian film to be nominated for the Platino Award in the Best Ibero-American Comedy category, and it is also the first carbon-neutral production in Latin America. The audience at the screening will have the opportunity to meet director Santiago Paladines.
The documentary Glass Skin tells the story of an emblematic Brazilian building on Monday. The 25-story “Pele de Vidro” was one of São Paulo’s early modern skyscrapers with a glass facade. After becoming uninhabited in 2003, it was taken over by squatters and the homeless, and finally caught fire and collapsed in 2018. The building was designed by Roger Zmekhol in the 1960s.
This poetic, personal documentary about the dramatic transformation of a tower block, dreamed up during the vibrant era of Bossa Nova and Cinema Novo and built in the early days of the dictatorship in power at the time, was made by the designer’s daughter, Denise Zmekhol.
The film days program will close on Tuesday, the 30th, with the Argentine comedy Message in a Bottle. Directed by Gabriel Nesci, the hero of the film is Denise, a young sommelier who discovers a mysterious method that allows her to send messages to the past in order to correct her old, bad decisions. But each message increasingly confuses her present and irrevocably changes the fate of everyone around her.
Luisana Lopilato, who plays the main role, is a popular star in Argentina, who has been seen in a wide variety of roles – she puts this versatility to good use in this film, which balances the genre between comedy and science fiction, and takes her hero back to different periods of his life. The films will be screened only once, in their original language, with subtitles.