Intimidades de Shakespeare y Víctor Hugo / Shakespeare and Víctor Hugo’s Intimacies (2009)
Directed by Yulene Olayloza (México)
Saturday, May 15, 2010 @ 7:00pm – HG 1070
83 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Presented by Bejamin Cluff

To call this film a documentary is not accurate. It is more than that; it’s a story od the multiple and hidden meanings that everyday places encapsulate. The visual narrative also shows us a common place in literature: Telling the story of another person is talking about oneself.

WORLD PREMIERE OF: Harvest of Loneliness: The Bracero Program (2010)
Directed by Gilbert G. González and Vivian Price (U.S./México)
Thursday, May 20, 2010 @ 7:00pm – HIB 100
58 minutes
Presented by Dr. Gilbert G. González and Vivian Price.

Hidden within the historical accounts of minorities, workers and immigrants in American society is the story of the millions of Mexico’s men and women who experienced the temporary contract worker program known as the Bracero Program. Established to replace an alleged wartime labor shortage, research reveals that the Program intended to undermine farmworker unionization. Harvest shows how several million men, in one of the largest state managed migrations in history, were imported from 1942 to 1964 to work as cheap, controlled and disposable workers. The documentary features the men speaking of their experiences and addresses what to expect from a new temporary contract worker program.

Desierto Adentro / The Deser Within (2007)
Directed by Rodrigo Plá (México)
Friday, May 21, 2010 @ 7:00pm – HG 1070
100 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Presented by Raquel Román

Elias has committed a great sin against God and is convinced that his children will bear the burden of a premature death because of these sins. Wanting to put a halt to the terrible punishment he is sure to receive, he dedicates his life to the construction of a church hoping to gain the pardon from God that he seeks. The story is narrated through Aureliano, the youngest and most vulnerable son, who will depict the family saga in religious ‘retablos’.

Los ladrones viejos: la leyenda del artegio / Old thieves: The legend of Artegio (2007)
Directed by Everardo González (México)
Saturday, May 22, 2010 @ 7:00pm – HG 1070
95 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Presented by Dr. Gonzalo Navajas

Using a wealth of archive images from film and television vaults, this documentary reveals Mexico City’s crime as an occupation subject to a strict code of conduct. Ranking in the hierarchy of thieves depended on, as in any other profession, talent and personal ambition. The footage is intercut with contemporary prison interviews of elderly criminals and the “old boys” are cheeky, charming – and chillingly ruthless.

Partes usadas / Used Parts (2007)
Directed by Aaron Fernández (México/France/Spain)
Thursday, May 27, 2010 @ 7:00pm – HG 1070
95 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Presented by Alberto Landaveri

Ivan is a 14-year-old boy who lives with his uncle Jaime, a mediocre businessman involved in a stolen car parts operation. Both of them dream of a better life and are saving to pay their way to Chicago, but when they realize they need more money to pay the “pollero”, Ivan recruits his friend Efrain to lend a hand. Both teenagers start to have fun and fulfill the uncle’s “invoice orders” until Ivan realizes that his uncle has other intentions behind the trip they are saving and planning to take together.

SPECIAL MATINEE SCREENING
Co-sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies & the Study of the Americas Working Group
“Retrieving & Preserving / It’s All True /: Unreleased Rushes From Orson Welles’s Unfinished Four-Part Film” (1941-42)
(México/Brazil)
Friday, May 28, 2010 @ 7:00pm – HG 1070
95 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Presented by associate productor and archival consultant Dr. Catherine Benamou.

In 1941, Orson Welles and his Mercury Productions embarked on a 4-part film project, titled IT’S ALL TRUE, that was to have depicted the labor of cultural expression and spaces for sociocultural interaction in the Americas, while engaging in collaborations with local artists and film talent. Three of the planned episodes for the film went into production – “My Friend Bonito,” shot under the direction of Norman Foster, followed the friendship between a young boy and a bull in central rural Mexico; “Carnaval” blended the documentation and reenactment of 1942 Carnival festivities in Rio de Janeiro; “Jangadeiros” (aka “Four Men on a Raft”) reenacted the voyage undertaken by four fishermen from the state of Ceará to Rio de Janeiro to petition President Getúlio Vargas for inclusion in his social security legislation. Owing to wartime difficulties and studio censorship,Welles was never able to complete and release IT’S ALL TRUE, yet the footage survived in the vaults at RKO, then at Desilu, and again at Paramount Pictures, Inc., where it was discovered in 1980. 200,000 feet of black-and-white footage were deposited at UCLA Film and Television Archive for preservation in March of 1985, and a documentary reconstruction of portions of the three episodes was released by Paramount and Les Films Balenciaga in 1993. Nearly half of the surviving footage was preserved for this purpose; yet more than 100,000 feet corresponding to the three episodes are still in nitrate form – and thus have yet to reach the public eye. This program features four unique reels of footage preserved since the 1990s with funding from the National Center for Film Preservation/American Film Institute and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

XII Latin American Film Festival

Los pecados de mi padre / Sins of My Father (2009)
Directed by Nicolás Entei (Argentina/Colombia)
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 @ 5:00pm – HG 1030
90 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Presented by Roberto Ayala

A son overwhelmed by the crimes of his father reconstructs the life od one of the biggest drug dealers of the world: Pablo Escobar Gaviria. In “Los pecados de mi padre”, Escobar’s son talks to victims’ sons to find forgiveness and healing. The film provides a new perspective of an unofficial war, fueled by the greed of some and the unquenchable hunger for new forms of recreation and evasion of many.

El secreto de sus ojos / The Secret of their Eyes (2009)
Directed by Juan José Campanella (Argentina)
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 @ 5:00pm – HG 1030
129 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Presented by Raquel Román

Once retired, Benjamín Espósito, a dull bureaucrat, writes about an unresolved homicide case. However, the more he inquires his memory, he finds a wounded self, an unreachable woman, and the truth about his past actions.

Martí: El ojo del canario / Martí: The Eye of the Canary (2010)
Directed by Fernando Pérez (Cuba)
Thursday, April 14, 2011 @ 5:00pm – HG 1030
120 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Presented by Dr. Raúl Fernández

The formative years of Cuban national hero José Julián Martí Pérez are explored in this historical epic, set during the 1860’s in colonial Havana. The film traces Martí from age 9 to 17 as he experiences firsthand the brutal inequalities of Spanish colonial rule and feels the fire of injustice rise within him.

El honor de las injurias / The Honour of the Wronged (2007)
Directed by Carlos García-Alix (Spain)
Tuesday, April 19, 2011 @ 5:00pm – HG 1030
88 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Presented by Dr. Santiago Morales-Rivera

El honor de las injurias is a documentary obsessed with tracking Felipe Sandoval’s life – better known by the press as “Doctor Muñiz, public enemy #1”- a man who is marked by the faith in a redeeming dream: social revolution. He will fisrt become a robber and a man of action and then during the Spanish Civil War, into a ruthless murderer.

El abrazo partido / The Lost Embrace (2004)
Directed by Daniel Burman (Cuba)
Wednesday, April 20, 2011 @ 5:00pm – HG 1030
97 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Presented by Dr. Emily Colbert-Cairns

Ariel and his mother run a lingerie shop in downtown Buenos Aires. It’s a comfortable, cloistered world, but many young people there still search for their immigrant roots. Ariel, however, wants more than that; he yearns to understand why his father laft his family shortly after his birth to fight a war in Israel…and why he never returned.

La teta asustada / The Milk of Sorrow (2009)
Directed by Claudia Llosa (Perú)
Thursday, April 21, 2011 @ 5:00pm – HG 1030
95 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Presented by Dr. Horacio Legrás

Fausta a young peruvian woman stricken with a pathological fear she contracted from her mother’s breast milk, must go to great lenghts to protect her sexuality and safety after her mother dies. La teta asustada – a condition suffered by women that were raped after Perú’s civil wars – haunts Fausta while she embarks on a frightening journey that may lead her towards freedom and wholeness.

Blackness and Indigeneity in the Americas

Mëjk (2014)
Directed by Carlos Pérez Rojas (México)
Wednesday, April 4, 2016 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
42 minutes – QA followed with Director Carlos Pérez Rojas

Genaro Rojas, better known as “Naro”, takes us on a journey through the surreal and magical world of the Sierra Mixe in Oaxaca, Mexico.Naro enjoys dedicating time to adversities and fragments of daily life that may appear to lack any meaning, since he is able to explain how they form part of broader socio-political and philosophical contexts, an exercise he practices even when he teaches, dances, washes his clothes or gets a haircut.
Mëjk, strength, is with Naro, when he contemplates the world of the Sierra Mixe as a passenger, traveling atop the bus, gripping its roof rack tightly as the bus careens around steep curves. Or when dashing among the fireworks of the town’s fiesta to their patron saint. In rare cases Naro does not feel capable of producing meaning through his narration, he also shares these crueller, more intimate moments with us.

Raíces de mi corazón / Roots of My Heart (2001)
Directed by Gloria Rolando (Cuba)
Friday, April 6, 2016 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
21 minutes – Discussion with Professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard.

A present day AfroCuban woman Mercedes seeks her roots through her family history. Old photos, newspaper clippings jealously guarded by her grandmother, and her mother’s stories reveal her great-grandparents’ history. The historical truth raises the curtains through a love story. Reality and fantasy get mixed in, but all the elements integrated into the narration point towards the central figure, the woman, and to a moving chapter of turn of the century Cuba, when there occurred a violent repression of the AfroCubans who protested out of the frustration that fell over Cubans after the War of Independence. This drama follows a young Cuban woman investigating her family history, and discovering disturbing revelations about the 1912 genocide, in which over 6,000 members of the Independents of Color were killed by the Cuban Army

Detroit’s Rivera: Work, Public Art, and Film (2017)
Directed by Julio Ramos (United States)
Saturday, April 7, 2016 @ 5:00pm – HG 1010
35 minutes – Presented by Julio Ramos and Sponsored by the Spanish and Portuguese Department at UC IRVINE.

A documentary on the process of production of Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Frescoes and the murals’ agitated social context during the years of the Great Depression. The documentary’s remarkable archival montage explores the links between industrial labor, public art, and industrial cinema under the exigencies of Fordism.

El abrazo de la Serpiente / Embrace of the Serpent (2015)
Directed by Ciro Guerra (Colombia)
Saturday, April 14, 2016 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
122 minutes

In the Amazonian jungle in the early 1900s, the German explorer Theo and his guide Manduca meet the shaman Karamakate. Theo has been in Amazonia for a long time already, but is very ill and in search of a rare medicinal plant. The shaman, whose people were murdered and displaced by white men, accompanies the two in the hope of finding surviving members of his tribe. What follows is a physically and mentally enervating and exhausting journey across the river, shot in breathtaking black-and-white images.
The journey reveals the influence of Western greed and missionary zeal in this previously unspoilt territory. The scenes are intercut with images of an expedition that takes place decades later, when a young American is confronted with an aged Karamakate. The film exudes grief over a lost civilization, whose unique insights and relationship to nature have so much to teach the Western world, especially now. In 2016, the film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Winner Hubert Bals Fund Dioraphte Award 2016.

Mestizo (1988)
Directed by Mario Handler (Venezuela / Cuba)
Wednesday, April 14, 2016 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
83 minutes

A village on the Venezuelan coast, a place of fishermen and big haciendas. Aquiles Vargas, a white aristocrat in somewhat reduced circumstances, fights with Cruz Guaregua, a humble black fisherwoman, and mother of his only son, a half-caste ‘mestizo’. Vargas takes the Mestizo away to raise him as a white, with his Aunt Milita as foster-mother. As an adolescent, the ‘mestizo’ Jose Ramon is propelled by his bohemian Uncle Ramon towards poetry, but Aquiles takes him to be ‘civilized’ in the local courthouse. There he is taken into a perverse relationship with the judge’s wife, while the judge watches. Jose Ramon escapes, horrified, but in his naivety finds himself in love with the judge’s wife. But the situation is impossible. Jose Ramon tries in vain to be a fisherman, but fights with his mother. Aunt Milita sends a servant girl to seduce him and bring him back home. Everybody, beginning with Cruz, tries to save him. But the social and sexual conflicts, power, culture and the Law, and above all the impossible relationship between the Mestizo and his parents, finally drive him from his village.

A dios momo (2005)
Directed by Leonardo Ricagni (Uruguay)
Friday, April 20, 2016 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
100 minutes – Discussion with Horacio Legrás

Eleven-year-old Obdulio forgoes school so he can sell newspapers in order to provide for his grandmother and two sisters. But when a magical night watchman introduces him to the power of words, an amazed Obdulio vows to learn to read and write.

Cultural Memory and Environmental Conflicts in Latin America

Daughters of the Forest / The Fence (2016)
Directed by Samantha Grant (Paraguay)
Wednesday, February 21, 2018 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
21 minutes – QA followed with Martin Burt (Bloom Center Visiting Scholar)

Daughters of the Forest tells the intimate, powerful story of a small group of girls in one of the most remote forests left on earth who are transformed by attending a radical high school where they learn to protect the threatened forest and build a better future for themselves.

Animales de Alquiler / Animals for Rent (2010)
Directed by Pablo Ortega (Costa Rica)
Wednesday, February 21, 2018 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
10 minutes

“Animals for Rent – ​​A reserve of wild capitalism”, is located in the future (year 2078) and shows the results of a hypothetical project implemented by large commercial laboratories, in which they grafted genes from animals in danger of extinction to human beings. Central Americans in exchange for a social aid package.

La Cerca / The Fence (2004)
Directed by Rubén Mendoza (Colombia)
Wednesday, February 21, 2018 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
21 minutes

Francisco Maldonado lives tormented by his dreams. In them he is armed and attacks his father, with whom he has not had further contact since the death of his mother. On December 31, Don Juan Cristo, his father, visits him so that they can meet the deadline set ten years ago, when Francisco’s mother died and he wrote in her will that they destroy the fence that divides his land. During the unexpected reunion, the two drink and talk until Francisco confesses to his father the visions of his dreams. A singular tragedy around pain, black humor, childhood, political parties and the fence, while the New Year’s dolls are consumed in the flames.

Ilha das Flores / The Fence (1989)
Directed by Jorge Furtado (Colombia)
Wednesday, February 21, 2018 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
13 minutes

The ironic, heartbreaking and acid “saga” of a spoiled tomato: from the plantation of a “Nisei” (Brazilian with Japanese origins); to a supermarket; to a consumer’s kitchen to become sauce of a pork meat; to the garbage can since it is spoiled for the consumption; to a garbage truck to be dumped in a garbage dump in “Ilha das Flores”; to the selection of nutriment for pigs by the employees of a pigs breeder; to become food for poor Brazilian people.

Jauja (2014)
Directed by Lisandro Alonso (Colombia)
Monday, February 26, 2018 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
110 minutes

Set in the late 19th Century Argentina, Danish Capitain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Morteson) and his daughter Ingeborg Zuluaga a former officer that now lives in the desert and leads a group of bandits. After Ingeborg runs awaywith a soldier, the captain wanders through the desert looking for her. Like a postcard with vivid colors, Jauja ambles through the distorted time, space, and reality.

Yvy Maraey (2013)
Directed by Juan Carlos Valdivia (Bolivia/México/Noruega)
Monday, March 5, 2018 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
105 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Followed by a Discussion

A filmmaker tracing the steps of Swedish explorer Erland Nordeskiold travels with a Guarani Indian from the highlands of La Paz to the swamps in the forests of South Eastern Bolivia, a place where uncontacted indigenous still exist. Philosophical Road Movie into the heart of Guarani culture of Bolivia translates ancient knowledge and explores the importance of the other in the construction of our identity.

Oscuro animal (2016)
Directed by Felipe Guerrero (Colombia)
Thursday, March 16, 2018 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
107 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles.
Followed by a QA session with Director Felipe Guerrero

Oscuro animal is a striking meditation of the armed conflict in Colombia. Following three separate stories: Rocío, La Mona, and Nelsa, this film ruminates on the most, brutal violence at the same time that it makes visible a violence that gradually invades the psychic and the body of the women.

Laberinto Yoeme/ Yo’eme Labyrinth (2019)
Directed by Felipe Guerrero (México/Spain)
Wednesday, April 4, 2018 @ 5:00pm – McCormick Screening Room
87 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles
Followed by a QA session with Director Sergi Pedro Ross and Producer César Talamantes

The documentary is about the difficulties that the Yaquis of Sonora (Mexico) face and their ancestral defense of the land and life in Mexico. Today they face a decisive battle. Since 2010, the government of Sonora, through the Independencia Aqueduct, has illegally diverted millions of cubic meters of water from the Yaqui River, causing a serious drought for the tribe and endangering their lives. At the same time, its territory has been flooded with drugs and violence. Yaquis seek an answer in the depths of their cultural identity.