TheDonostia-San Sebastian International Film Festival (Sept 15-24) is expandingits geographical reach with a new financing initiative targeting North Africanfilmmakers, building on its current reputation as a hotbed for emerging Latintalents.

The festival has unveiled two sections in two days: thepopular Latin Horizons competition, where many of the films are alumni orfinalists of the festival's Films in Progress completion financing initiative,and Cinema in Motion, a new one-day initiative (Sept 19) modelled on Films inProgress and featuring North African projects and films.

The inspiration for Cinema in Motion - launched jointly withfilm festivals in Amiens, France and Fribourg, Switzerland - stemmed from aretrospective on Maghrebi cinema organized by the festival two yearsago."The attention that retrospective elicited among the public and themedia, not to mention the social echo it had, showed us there was much intereston both sides of the Mediterranean for boundaries to start fading away," saidfestival director Mikel Olaciregui.

The eight unfinished projects and films from the Maghreb andPortuguese-speaking African countries participating in Cinema in Motioninclude: L'Andalou, by Mohamed Chouikh (Algeria); Fanon, byAbdelkrim Bahloul (Algeria); Jardim do outro homem, by Sol de Carvalho(Mozambique); Kamikaze, by Nouri Bouzid (Tunisia); Mabrouk s'en vat'en guerre, by Abdellatif Ben Ammar (Tunisia); Mariage du loup, byJillani Saadi (Tunisia); Ti Intidar Pasolini, by Daoud Aoulad Syad(Morocco); WWW - What a Wonderful World, by Faouzi Bensaidi (Morocco).

Meanwhile, the 12 films competing for the Euros 18,000 LatinHorizons prize include titles which have screened in top internationalfestivals this year. The line-up is as follows:

Georgina Garcia Riedel's US-set generational tale How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer; Alma Mater, Uruguayan Alvaro Buela's modern-day Madonna fable; Mark Becker's US immigration documentary Romantico; Argentine Luis Ortega's female-driven character drama, Monobloc; Marcelo Gomes' 1940's Brazil-set road movie Cinema, Aspirin And Vultures; Ines de Oliveira's minimalist Como Pasan Las Horas (Arg); Marcelo Mangone's Gaston Pauls-starring comedy La Demolicion (Arg); Albertina Carri's Argentina-France co-production Geminis, a critical tale of one upper-class family; El Inmortal, Mercedes Moncada's documentary about one family's experience of Nicaragua's civil war; Chilean Sebastian Campos' family drama La Sagrada Familia; Amat Escalante's minimalist Sangre, produced by fellow Mexican director Carlos Reygadas; and Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio and Carlos Armella's compelling documentary about a Mayan bullfighter, Toro Negro.

LatinHorizons will also house three special screeners:

Edgardo Cozarinsky's opening film Ronda Nocturna, a tale of love, solitude and ghosts set in a nighttime Buenos Aires; Chilean writer Antonio Skarmata's Ardiente Paciencia (1983), the predecessor film to Michael Radford's Il Postino based on the same Skarmata novel; and Luis Bunuel's classic portrayal of Mexico's urban poor, Los Olvidados, which won the Cannes best director prize in 1950, will close the section with a recently restored print.