It's not a sea, it's a city; the sea's not silver, it's blue-grey; and the Che Guevara award has little or nothing to do with its namesake. But no matter: welcome to the magical world of the movies at Argentina's Mar del Plata film festival.
Starting tomorrow in this windswept, high-rise south Atlantic city - whose name refers to the nearby Río de la Plata - the 10-day festival features a selection of more than 300 films from 56 countries, wrestled into categories that, like string bags, only just contain their irregularly shaped contents under more or less arbitrary headers ("Point of View", "Near Darkness" and "Heterodoxy").
Hoping to define itself as the festival for Latin American cinema, Mar del Plata has a new prize to give this year: the $50,000 (£25,900) Ernesto "Che" Guevara award, which has drawn submissions from 16 Latin American film-makers. This has led the organisers to draw shaky parallels between Che's idealism and that of the competition's pan-American ambitions and its goal of aiding cooperation between Latin American film-makers.
For Argentina, the prize comes at a significant moment. The country is still struggling to find its identity in the wake of the 2001 economic collapse and following decades spent gazing distractedly overseas, dreaming of a European past. Forced to look inland again, this notion of a unified Latin America at least offers some hope for the future.
The festival's decision to promote local talent aims at recapturing something of the region's pre-1950s glory days, film-wise, when screens across Latin America showed mainly Argentinean and Mexican films, as well as a few Brazilian gems that managed to slip under the language barrier. These days the situation is very different: in 2005, fewer than one in 60 of Argentina's 36m cinema admissions was for an Argentinean film.
One can see why this might be so. Much of modern Argentinean cinema tends to be introspective in style, dealing with existential, philosophical themes, restricting its audience to an urban intellectual elite, and leaving the socially conscious work to a growing documentarist movement - and to its neighbouring cohort of young Brazilian film-makers.
But at the other end of the spectrum, directors such as Daniel Burman and Juan José Campanella are busy creating new, mainstream films with high production values like Family Law and Luna de Avellaneda, attracting commercial success at home as well as admirers abroad.
With 12,000 film students in Argentina alone and a growing number of intercontinental co-productions enabling films from Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia to emerge, the possibilities are in place for a more interesting future for the continent. And in a bloc of countries whose combined population numbers more than 300 million, a resurgence in popular, commercial Latin American film would be a prize well worth winning.