Del Toro ecstatic on receiving Coral Award at Havana Film Festival

Puerto Rican actor Benicio del Toro has said “he is walking on clouds” after receiving the Coral Award at the 36th Festival of New Latin American Cinema in the Cuban capital where his new film on Colombian druglord Pablo Escobar was screened.

“To be in this festival, to present a film and to receive an award for the work, feels great,” Del Toro told the press Sunday at the doors of the downtown Yara movie theater in Havana where a huge crowd waited.

The Puerto Rican actor was honored with the award for being one of the most acclaimed figures of his generation with a great dramatic record in Latin America, said the organizers of the event.

Del Toro expressed his love and respect for Cuba which he said was like a family member for him.

One of the most anticipated films of the festival, “Escobar: Paradise Lost”, in which the actor plays the Colombian druglord, who, according to Del Toro, wasted his talents by choosing the wrong path to crime.

The film, directed by the Italian Andrea Di Stefano, was inspired by the true story of a young Canadian surfer who traveled to Colombia on vacation and fell for the young niece of Pablo Escobar, who, despite becoming good friends, tried to kill him.

Del Toro adds Escobar to his repertoire which already boasts of the characters of Javier Rodriguez from “Traffic” (2001), directed by Steven Soderbergh, for which he won an Oscar, and Jack Jordan from “21 grams” (2003), made by the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu.

The actor is best known in Cuba for “Che, the Argentine” and “Che, the Guerrilla”, both made by Soderbergh, in which Del Toro played the legendary guerrilla Ernesto “Che” Guevara which premiered at the Havana Festival in 2008.

His visits to Cuba also led him to try his luck as a director in 2011, when he filmed “The Yuma”, one of the shorts of the film “Seven days in Havana”, a SpanishFrench joint production.

At this year’s Havana Festival, Del Toro’s presence coincided with the screening of one of his other recent films, “Guardians of the Galaxy”, where he plays the obsessive accumulator of the largest collection of interstellar fauna, relics and species in space.

Del Toro, whose career took off in the mid1990’s with the film “The Usual Suspects” by Bryan Singer, is compared frequently with great American actors like Marlon Brando and Robert de Niro for his compelling performances.