Latino Directors & Actors Awarded at Sundance Film Festival 2013

Twitter: @AndreaGompf

The Sundance Film Festival is one of the most talked about in the U.S. – if a film does well there, it bodes well for major box office success. It also has the distinction of being pretty much the only event that could entice me to go to Utah.

This year, Santiago-born director Sebastián Silva continued Chile’s moment in the cinematic sun by winning the Directing Award for World Cinema Dramatic for his comedy “Crystal Fairy.” Shot in Chile,  the film is about a drug-head American (played by Michael Cera) who invites a nudity-loving hippie known as Crystal Fairy (played by Gaby Hoffmann), on a quest around Chile in search of a hallucinogenic cactus. Learn more about the film below:

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Perpetual crush Gael García Bernal is also on a hot streak – he’s not only the star of both the Oscar-nominated “No”  – but he also was a co-producer on the immigration documentary “Who Is Dayani Cristal?,” which took the Cinematography Award for World Cinema Documentary at Sundance. The film – inspired by Dayani Cristal’s fatal attempt to cross the border –  puts a human face on the dangers that immigrants confront as they seek a better life across the Arizona desert. To learn more, check out the film’s website here.