Cine Campesino is a project set up by Un Mundo, a small NGO that operates in the valley of the river Cangrejal on the north coast of Honduras. It initated with a film festival in 2002 that lasted 3 days. After the second edition, Cine Campesino went mobile and started giving free film festivals in rural Honduran comunities. Cine Campesino left Un Mundo during the course of 2004 to join Arte Acción Copán Ruinas.

Cine Campesino shows Spanish spoken Latin American movies with social themes primarily in mountain villages in Honduras that have no access to electricity, cable or a video store. This means that some 95% of villages would be eligible for a Cine Campesino Film Festival. The way these are done is as follows; we make contact with a local or a Peace Corps Volunteer who has a cell phone or who can use the internet, we discuss a date that suits us both, we send them the folder “How to organize a Film Festival in YOUR Comunity ” and then we have night of cine!

Four years and 103 film festivals later, we have completed a documentaty on people who have never seen a movie before in their lives. This is a homage to Por Primera Vez, a Cuban documentary from 1967 with the same theme.

Here´s a small preview.

The documentary has been shown on the Noordelijk Film Festival and the Sidney Latin American Film Festival and will be screened on a number of other film festivals throughout the world; most notably the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the International Documantary Film Festival Amsterdam.