Give credit to the Motion Picture Academy for allowing the entry of films that are not allowed to be shown in their country of origin. The Venezuelan film, El Inca, is a biography of the boxer Edwin Valero, who was world champion in the super featherweight and lightweight divisions and never lost a professional fight. If this was an American movie, Alexander Leterni, who plays Valero, would be a favorite for an Oscar nomination. Unfortunately, Valero’s legacy includes the fact that he murdered his wife in 2010 and then committed suicide in jail the next day.
But the real reason El Inca was pulled from the theaters in Venezuela after only two weeks is that Valero was a friend of strongman Hugo Chávez and actually fought with a color tattoo of Chávez on his chest. At the showing I attended, which was presented by TheWrap website, director Ignacio Castillo Cottin and producer Nathalie Sar-Shalom explained that they were able to have the injunction against the film overturned. However, the Venezuelan Supreme Court reinstated the ban, pending a “quick” final decision that never came.
