Hollywood
18th Latin American films to compete in Havana Filmfest in New York
NEW DELHI: Eighteen films will be competing to receive the Havana Star Prize for Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay, as well as the Havana Star Prize for Best Documentary at the 16th Havana Film Festival in New York
The awards will be announced at the festival’s Closing Night Ceremony on 17 April at the Directors Guild Theatre. The Festival commences from 9 April.
Prominent members of Latino culture and film industry will choose the winning films. In the fiction category, the jury includes director and screenwriter Alberto Ferreras (HBO’s Habla series, Que Viva la Musica); film producer and director of Festival International del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de la Habana Ivan Giroud; and actress and singer Cristina Morrison.
In the documentary category, the jury will include director and producer Catherine Murphy (Maestra); director and cinematographer German Gutierrez (Coca-Cola Case, Who Shot my Brother) and Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Fairfield University, Michelle Farell.
The films in competition come from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, United States, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Many of the filmmakers will be in New York to present their films. A majority of the films will have their American premieres at the Festival.
The films competing for the Havana Star Prize in Fiction are: Refugiado (Diego Lerman, Argentina); Road 47 (Vicente Ferraz, Brazil), Natural Disasters (Bernardo Quesney, Chile), Wasting Time (Alexander Giraldo, Colombia),Boccacio in Havana (Arturo Sotto, Cuba), The Wall Of Words (Fernando Perez, Cuba); His Wedding Dress (Marilyn Solaya, Cuba); Venice (Kiki Alvarez, Cuba – Colombia); Open Cage (Maximiliano Zunino, Mexico); and Kaplan (Alvaro Brencher, Uruguay).
The documentary films competing for the Havana Star Prize in Documentary are: A Matter of Land (Patricia Ayala, Colombia); Omara: Cuba (Lester Hamlet, Cuba); Another Island (Heidi Hassan, Cuba – Switzerland); You and Me (Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada, Dominican Republic); All of Me (Arturo Gonzalez Villasenor, Mexico); The Troublemaker, Behind the Scenes of the United Nations (Roberto Salinas, Nicaragua – US – Italy); Havana Curveball (Marcia Jarmel & Ken Schneider, US – Cuba); and The Silence Of The Flies (Eliezer Arias, Venezuela).
HFFNY is made possible with public funds from the NYS Council on the Arts, a state agency, and supported, in part, by public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.
The Havana Film Festival New York is a project of American Friends of the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba (AFLFC), a non-profit organization that builds cultural bridges between the U.S. and Cuba through programmes in the arts.
Hollywood
Remembering Chuck Norris: the man, the myth, the legend at 86
From martial arts legend to internet folklore, fans honour his final level up
KAUAI: The world lost a legend on 19 March 2026, when Chuck Norris died aged 86. For a man long treated as immortal in internet folklore, the news felt almost unreal. Yet in true Norris fashion, the farewell has been less about mourning and more about myth-making.
Just days before his passing, on his 86th birthday, Norris shared a video from Kauaʻi, Hawaii, showing him sparring under the sun. His caption was characteristically wry: “I don’t age. I level up.” It now reads like a final wink to fans who had spent years elevating him to near-superhuman status.
His death followed a sudden medical emergency while on holiday. He passed away peacefully, surrounded by family, who described him not just as a global symbol of strength, but as a devoted husband, father and grandfather.
Online, grief quickly gave way to tribute in the language Norris helped popularise. Social media filled with one last wave of “Chuck Norris Facts”, the tongue-in-cheek myths that turned him into a digital demigod. The jokes wrote themselves, as always. Death did not take Norris, it finally dared to meet him.
Behind the humour, however, lies a formidable real-world legacy.
Long before the memes, Norris was Carlos Ray Norris, a decorated martial artist. After serving in the US Air Force, he rose to become a six-time world professional middleweight karate champion. His on-screen duel with Bruce Lee in Way of the Dragon remains one of cinema’s most iconic fight sequences.
Through the 1980s, he became the face of action cinema with films such as Missing in Action and The Delta Force, embodying a stoic, no-nonsense hero. In the 1990s, he reached living rooms worldwide as Cordell Walker in Walker, Texas Ranger, blending Western grit with martial arts flair.
Off-screen, his work carried equal weight. His foundation, Kickstart Kids, continues to teach martial arts to at-risk youth, focusing on discipline and self-worth. He also founded Chun Kuk Do, a martial arts system that trained thousands.
What made Norris unique was not just his strength, but his willingness to laugh at it. When the internet transformed him into an exaggerated symbol of invincibility, he embraced the joke. In doing so, he bridged generations, from cinema-goers to meme-makers.
His passing marks more than the loss of an action star. It signals the fading of a rare cultural crossover, where genuine athletic prowess met Hollywood heroism and early internet humour.
For many, remembering Chuck Norris means recalling a time when heroes were simple, punches were decisive and the internet still felt like a playground of shared jokes.
And if the myths are to be believed, this is not quite the end. It is simply Chuck Norris moving on to his next level.
