Film Festivals in December

The Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano is the defining event of Latin American cinema, and it has run in Havana every December since 1979. Founded under the Cuban film institute ICAIC by Alfredo Guevara, it built the Coral awards into the region's most watched prize and turned the city into a two-week meeting point for directors, critics and audiences from across the continent. Screenings fill the grand old cinemas of Vedado and Centro Habana, from the Yara opposite the Coppelia ice-cream park to the Charles Chaplin, the Acapulco and La Rampa, and the queues and street debate outside are as much the festival as the films. For anyone serious about Latin American film, this is the room to be in.

The Blue Chair Film Festival, known for its first sixteen years as the Luang Prabang Film Festival, is Laos's window onto Southeast Asian cinema. Founded in 2010, it fills the UNESCO town each December with free open-air screenings shown after dark on a big screen, with the audience seated in the hundreds of blue plastic chairs that gave the festival its new name. The program is drawn entirely from the ASEAN region, so a few evenings here is a crash course in the films of Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Laos itself, a national cinema most visitors never encounter. Alongside the screenings the festival runs a Talent Lab for emerging regional directors and small filmmaker grants, which makes it a genuine industry gathering rather than just a projection under the stars.

The Tbilisi International Film Festival has run since 2000 at the Amirani Cinema, staged by Cinema Art Center Prometheus, the arthouse operation behind the capital's two historic cinemas, with its Georgian Panorama section serving as the annual census of a national new wave that keeps winning European festivals outsized to the country's size. Editions run about a week each early December, the 26th closing December 7, and the festival has held its dates through funding fights that would have folded softer institutions. Georgian cinema from Ioseliani to the current generation is one of Europe's great under-watched bodies of work; this is where it screens at home.