| home | |
| now playing | |
| calendar | |
| coming soon | |
| special events | |
| theatre
of the wild |
|
| sky room | |
| past events | |
| membership | |
| contact us |
2006 Latino Film Festival
Friday, March 24 thru Sunday, March 26 Friday, March 24
2:30pm — Our Brand is Crisis Saturday, March 25 2:30pm — Everyone Their Grain of Sand; Sunday, March 26 2:15pm — Dirt (Reception @ 4:15pm)
Sunday Guest Speaker: Eduardo Mendieta Willy Loman, Arthur Miller’s archetypal American salesman, would be stunned by the aura of some modern-day American salesman: their clients are the economic-political power elites dazzled by the profit-producing systems of America’s New World Global Economic Order. These new spin doctors: Ivy League-trained in the new social sciences, powered by in-depth computer-spewed charts of social-economic trends. In Rachel Boynton’s film we accompany James Carville and company on a private jet destined for Bolivia, a nation with mass poverty and unemployment and with 60% of the people disenfranchised. Their task: to help elect Goni, a millionaire scion of the mining industry, a Market Reform candidate, to the Bolivian presidency. The new Bolivian president, Evo Morales, appears in the film as a challenging opponent.—Vic Skolnick (Bolivia, 2005, 87 min, color, English &Spanish w/English subtitles • Director/writer: Rachel Boynton • Cast: James Carville, Evo Morales) (Double feature with The Devil’s Miner)
Sunday Guest Speaker: Eduardo Mendieta Since the 16th century, miners in the Cerro Chico silver mines in Bolivia have explained the dark, dusty and dangerous environment they work in by claiming that it was the realm of the devil and decorating each new shaft with a small statue of the king of darkness. As we are introduced to the lives of miner brothers Basilio (14) and Bernardino (12) who work long shifts between moving carts and explosions, we begin to realize that the miners’ beliefs might be more rational than they appear at first. This is a story of two courageous brothers who, in order to save enough money to pursue their studies, must enter the darkness of the mine with the hope of finding a future away from it. –Adrian Perez Melgosa (Bolivia, 2005, 82 min., color, in Spanish with English subtitles • Directors/writers: Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani) (Double feature with Our Brand is Crisis)
In Dirt Nancy Savoca creates a finely developed portrait of an El Salvadorian cleaning woman struggling to keep her family together in an unfriendly world of New York City. Rosaria, for 12 anxious years, has survived as an undocumented domestic worker from El Salvador; her Park Avenue pay is better, but she no job security or benefits which will loom large when crisis strikes. Rofolfo, her easy-going husband, and Rudy, her 15-year-old son, do little to assuage her not always suppressed anxiety. Son Rudy is Americanized and is impatient with his Latino parents The wonder of this film is the dramatization of the multitude of problems confronting undocumented working people from lands South of the Border.—Vic Skolnick (USA, 2003, 91 min., color, English and Spanish with English subtitles • Director/writer: Nancy Savoca • Co-writer: Richard Guay • Cast: Julieta Ortiz, Deborah Hedwall, John Tormey, Franklin Rodríguez, Nathaniel Freeman & Yvette Mercedes)
In the Dominican Republic it’s the Bachata, once despised as the music of the underworld and created and performed by the underclass. The self-taught players, bachatero, are mostly men playing the guitar and the drum, instruments that are inexpensive, available, and easily transportable. They sing about stuff of their lives, love and sex and family complicated by endemic unemployment, prostitution, alcohol, and drugs. Director Alex Wolfe delivers the truly lusty history of the music’s rags to riches rise largely told through the career of Luis Vargas, the King of the Bachateros. —Vic Skolnick (Dominican Republic/USA, 2003, 75 min., b/w, & color, in Spanish and English with English subtitles • Director/writer: Alex Wolfe • Co-writer: Richard Fleming • Cast: Luis Vargas)
Cuba’s hard-pulsing-rhythmic-motor-driven hip-hop and rap from the hood views itself as the social conscience and rips at the chronic social problems as viewed by Black Afro-Cubans. Other voices are heard as they speak and perform about the problems of personal economic survival in an economy strapped by the US economic blockade. But for these Afro-Cubans there is the pride of being a Caribbean nation independent of the Yankee Colossus. —Vic Skolnick (Cuba, 2005, 70 min., in English and Spanish with English subtitles • Directors/writers: Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck)
In Santiago de Chile, during the early 70s, the principal of a highly exclusive secondary school attempts a small experiment in human solidarity: he admits as students a group of boys from a local shantytown. As social prejudices rise among students, two eleven year olds, Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna), the son of a street vendor, and Gonzalo Infante (Matías Quer), the son of a diplomat, start an unlikely friendship. With each boy’s journey into the everyday life of the other, director Andrés Wood manages to capture a lively slice of life in Santiago in the short years that saw the election of Salvador Allende to the presidency and then the military coup that imposed the long Pinochet dictatorship. –Adrian Perez Melgosa (Chile, 2004, 121 min., color, in Spanish with English subtitles • Director/writer: Andrés Wood • Cast: Matías Quer, Ariel Mateluna, Manuela Martelli, Ernesto Malbran & Aline Küppenheim)
Stirring documentary of the ongoing struggle of the townspeople of Maclovia Rojas whose efforts to create a self-sustaining community are being thwarted by the Tijuana state government. Maclovia Rojas lands were provided by a federal land grant program that is no longer in force. Community property there had been donated to low- income people. The government of Tijuana through harassment and delay is trying to seize their land near the border town of Tijuana. Land in the area is being sold to multinational corporations like Hyundai, Sony et al. They set up large factories paying substandard wages to Mexicans bussed in from the surrounding area. Community leaders,who helped residents build a school and a makeshift running-water facility, are harassed and persecuted. One is incarcerated and three more are in hiding. (Mexico/USA, 2005, 87 min., color, English and Spanish with English subtitles • Director/cinematographer: Beth Bird)
In January 2003 a wave of hope for social change galvanized poor and working-class Brazilians as Luiz Inácio da Silva (Lula), a metalworker with a primary education and a long history as a labor organizer, was confirmed as the 41st president of the country. Two years later, director Gonzalo Arijón traveled throughout the country to evaluate the achievements as well as the failures of his administration. With special focus on Lula’s personal history, his Zero Hunger initiative and the difficult negotiations of the popularly elected president with the traditional economic and political powerbrokers of the country, this documentary paints an in- depth realistic picture of Lula’s presidency that both criticizes and keeps up the flame of hope. –Adrian Perez Melgosa (Brazil, 2005, 62 min., color, in Spanish with English subtitles)
|
|
