This morning the Los Angeles Film Festival announced their line up for the 2011 festival, each year the festival selects an international spotlight and this year the festival has chosen to focus on Cuba whose films are rarely distributed in the United States. This special program has been sponsored by the Department of Cultural Affairs and UCLA Latin American Institute. Among the films scheduled to appear is documentary Operation Peter Pan: Flying Back to Cuba.

Operation Peter Pan was coordinated by the US in the 1960s. Over 14,000 children from Cuba to Miami by parents who opposed the revolutionary government of Cuba and later expanded to parents who feared their children would be shipped off to work in Soviet camps. The operation was extremely controversial. The documentary recounts the story of five “Peter Pans” who return to Cuba 50 years after they were uprooted and taken from their families.

In addition to the International Spotlight the Los Angeles Film Festival features another program; Documenting Mexico. Inspired by the efforts of the Ambulante Film Festival, a traveling film event designed to promote a documentary culture across Mexico.

In competition the International Showcase features at least four films from Latin America including a North American Premiere of Gustavo Taretto’s Medianeras; which was originally a short film and has been expanded into a feature.

For more information on all of the films programmed for this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival, check out their press release at Film Independent, their parent site.