Welcome to Cine Sin Lata

This started a long time ago, back in 2004, when I was a college student in Caracas, Venezuela, my home country. By then, I was half way through to obtain my Arts degree, which I finally got, three years later, specializing in Film.

This was just an idea. We were just a bunch of students making really –really– low budget short films, going to film festivals, organising petit comité movie projections on any available classroom with VHS tapes or DVD copies of our favorites or recently found -and quickly admired- filmmakers.

That’s when “Cine Sin Lata” started. It literally means “Film without a can” in spanish. I don’t know if lata, the word for can, means exactly the same in every spanish speaking country, but in Venezuela, it was the term used for film can as well as the food and drinks metallic package. Kind of a bad inside joke, I came up with this phrase and submitted it to votation for approval on our group to be some kind of brand for our projects, specially the showing movies in the university kind. They instantly liked it. With those three words we were saying not only that we had no budget, no cameras, and no professional equipment, we were also saying that we still made our projects using a tiny mini DV Sony camera (no film negative, just digital) and stealing bulbs from our houses to make the lighting, that we borrowed VHS or DVD’s just for the pleasure of showing rare movies to a tiny audience on a hot afternoon in Caracas’ UCV (Universidad Central de Venezuela) and that we enjoyed writing and taping our (sometimes really weird) ideas. We were saying we didn’t care.

After we graduated and each one of us took their separate ways, this project went from a faulty VHS tape with some posters announcing the movie with the image of a tomato soup from the 50’s, to a youtube channel, where I just posted my three short films to live on the internet, hoping some lonely soul somewhere in the globe would watch them someday, and enjoy them for what they are: student’s short films made with joy. Then I started working on TV, for almost seven years, and it became a demo reel channel for my on air promotions, a portfolio of my editing jobs for different NGO’s and companies. An easier way to show, if it was needed, my work, and also an efficient way of keeping those videos online and available whenever and wherever, without having to worry about my hard drives or back up folders.

Now it’s a blog. Mostly because I became an enthusiast of wordpress and I want to practise my skills on this, but also as a reminder -now very far from home and living in Madrid, Spain- that no matter the years gone by, the enthusiasm for making new things and expressing ideas remains the same.

So.. welcome, I’ll be posting different contents here, not only my demo reel, but also some articles I’ve been thinking on writing, just for fun.

So, like Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “Stick Around!”

This is Cine Sin Lata.

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