Mariana Rondón’s PELO MALO Will Have its U.S. Premiere
at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival
Winner of San Sebastian’s Golden Shell, the Acclaimed Venezuelan Film
Will Have a U.S. Theatrical Run this Fall,
Starting at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in
** Filmmaker Available for Interviews **
FiGa Films and Cinema Tropical are proud to present the U.S. Premiere of PELO MALO by Mariana Rondón, as part of the 2014 lineup of the Tribeca Film Festival, running April 16-27 in New York City. Acclaimed by as a “a bold and intelligently perceptive film,” Rondón’s feature film was the winner of Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival, becoming the first Venezuelan film to ever win the top honors at the Spanish Festival. The filmmaker will travel to New York to participate in her film’s U.S. Premiere.
Winner of the Special Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Awards at the Thessaloniki Film Festival and the Best Director and Best Screenplay Awards at the Mar del Plata Film Festival, PELO MALO will have a U.S. theatrical run in different cities across the country this fall, starting with a theatrical engagement at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.
In PELO MALO, Junior is a nine-year-old boy who has stubbornly curly hair, or “bad hair.” He wants to have it straightened for his yearbook picture, like a fashionable pop singer with long, ironed hair. This puts him at odds with his mother Marta, a young, unemployed widow.
Junior, Marta, and his baby brother live in a large multi-family building. Overwhelmed by what it takes to survive in the chaotic city of Caracas, Marta finds it increasingly difficult to tolerate Junior’s fixation with his looks. The more Junior tries to look sharp and make his mother love him, the more she rejects him. His paternal grandmother, a witness to this rejection, asks Marta to give her the boy so that he can look after her. Marta refuses and tries to correct her son’s obsession by “setting an example,” a cruel moment which was meant to be a lesson. Junior finds himself cornered, face to face with a painful decision.
“Mariana Rondon’s impressively multilayered drama brings a powerful specificity to the story of a boy
and his embittered single mother.”– Jay Weissberg, Variety
About the Director: Director, screenwriter, visual artist Mariana Rondón was born in . After studying Animated Film in Paris, she graduated at first generation of the Film School EICTV, Cuba. Her short film Street 22 received 22 international awards. Her first feature, At Midnight and a Half (2000) co-directed by Marité Ugás, received five Opera Prima awards and participated in more than 40 international film festivals. Her 2007 feature film Postcards from Leningrad received 23 international awards, such as FIPRESCI at Kerala, Grand Prix at Biarritz and Revelation Jury Award at the de Sao Paulo Festival. In Plastic Arts, her robotics installation You Came With The Breeze (Fundación Telefónica Award) has been exhibited in Caracas, Mexico City, Puebla, Gijón, Lima, Santiago and Beijing as part of the Olympics Cultural Project, 2008. She is presently working on the Interactive installation Superbloque.
For more information, press notes, hi-res images, screener for review, or to schedule an interview with the filmmaker, please contact Raúl Guzmán, (212)