In 2008 Lucho Ramirez founded Cine+Mas SF, showcasing 15 independent films from the Spanish-speaking world. Today, the festival screens about 70 features a year, including eight short programs. Most of the movies are made in the United States with, on average, 10 Latin countries represented. Flicks from Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile are the most popular with audiences.. In 2022 Cine+Mas SF attracted 1,200 audience members in person, 2,800 guests virtually.
This year Cine+Mas SF received 450 submissions from filmmakers around the world, with 75 selected by a Cine+Mas screening committee based on production value, acting quality, and story strengths.
According to Ramirez, recent submissions include “queerish” stories, migration tales, thrillers, and comedies, which reflect a variety of communities, such as the indigenous South American Wichi, Oaxaca clothing designers, and Northern California Chicano “souleros;” hard core soul music collectors.
Ramirez’s love for Spanish-speaking films began in Chicago where he grew up speaking the language at home with his Mexican-born parents. His father worked at the Vienna Sausage factory; his mother was a homemaker. As a bilingual teenager, Ramirez marveled at the variety of tones found in the Spanish speaking films he’d watch at the neighborhood Spanish language theater.
Movies such as Blood Wedding and Carmen “showed a window into a different kind of Spanish,” he said. “I still go and watch some of those films on You Tube, little snippets. They say so much.”
After completing business school in Phoenix, teaching English in Japan, and working in film distribution in Paris, Ramirez arrived in San Francisco in 1997. He couch-surfed for a few months until he heard someone was looking for a roommate in Potrero Hill. He’s rented the same Connecticut Street apartment ever since.
Ramirez began his career in film festival programming working sponsorship sales for the San Francisco International Latino Film Festival. When that festival folded, Ramirez started Cine+Mas SF, initially screening at the Clay and the Lumiere, both now defunct, as well as the Mission Cultural Center, La Peña in Berkeley, and Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana in San Jose.
“It was fun!” he said of programming his first festival. “I didn’t know how to do things There was a hint of imposter syndrome. I had to learn how to do things and to use the right language such as “inviting” films from filmmakers.”
He also discovered that film festivals aren’t just about prestige but enable independent filmmakers to attract distributors. Among Ramirez’s favorite memories is screening films from the 1990s that sparked Chicano nostalgia among audiences, as well as a showingof Ruben Blades is Not My Name, filmmaker Abner Benaim’s 2018 documentary about the salsa musician icon which served as a “reunion of sorts” for local musicians.
While box office phenomenon like Barbie and Oppenheimer seduced audiences out of their homes this year, attendance at independent films haven’t reached pre-pandemic levels. Ramirez finds it challenging to locate spaces to screen his movie selections. Theater rentals can cost almost twice as much as in 2022. Despite sponsorship from companies such as Toyota, Xfinity, and the Roxie Theater, staying afloat is a struggle.
The pandemic “reset media consumption” and associated economics, Ramirez said. In the past, the festival could offer complementary hospitality to filmmakers to travel to San Francisco to share their films in person. With the changing financial landscape, if movie makers are present, it’s often on their own dime.
“I had insomnia last night,” Ramirez said. “But then I say to myself this happens every year. And we somehow make it happen every year.”
The Cine+Mas SF Latino Film Festival run from October 7 to 22 at the Roxie, Mission Cultural Center, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and other venues.
