Cine las Americas Previews
Fri., April 11, 2008
The American (La Americana)
D: Nicholas BruckmanDocumentary Feature Competition, U.S.
Maria del Carmen Rojas is a Bolivian woman working illegally in New York City. After a bus accident left her young daughter in a wheelchair, Rojas – knowing that she would never make enough money in her home country to pay all the medical bills – made the long journey to a seedy motel in Tijuana, Mexico, and then, stowed inside a car seat, crossed the border into California to begin her new life as a public enemy of the state, a criminal mastermind in the eyes of the U.S. government, though one barely scraping by vacuuming floors and washing dogs in Madison Avenue boutiques and for various Upper East Side swells. Rojas' story is probably not much different from those of the other 12 million or so men and women currently living illegally in the U.S., and La Americana director Bruckman is smart to set his heroine's story against the backdrop of the intractable political debate over immigration raging in the halls of Congress and on 24-hour cable-news shows, giving his film a sense of weight and historical importance. When you've sacrificed everything for a shot at the American dream, all politics are truly personal. – Josh Rosenblatt
Friday, April 18, 9pm, Metropolitan
Bad Habits (Malos Hábitos)
D: Simón Bross; with Jimena Ayala, Elena de Haro, Marco Treviño, Aurora Cano, Elisa VicedoNew Releases, Mexico
This dark, visually lush film follows the various eating disorders enacted by a wealthy Mexico City family and the pathologies that attach themselves to food and its consumption. Matilde, a young, earnest nun, undertakes an anchoritic starvation in order to alleviate what she perceives to be a second great flood. Elena, her anorexic sister-in-law, torments her chubby daughter with various weight-loss snake-oil treatments in an attempt to achieve princesslike perfection. "No one likes fat people," she tells her only child. "Don't you want to get married and live in a beautiful house?" Malos Hábitos is not only about how women abuse themselves (and others) in service to an unrealistic ideal but also how society both contributes to and is compromised by this postmodern mortification of the body. It's hard to fathom a beautiful film about eating disorders, but Bross evokes the aesthetic of his countryman Guillermo del Toro and has crafted a brutal yet sensitive, wonderfully ambiguous tale in which food and women's complicated relationships with it take on breathtakingly gorgeous dimensions. – Melanie Haupt
Tuesday, April 22, 9:45pm, Alamo South Lamar
Children of the War (Hijos de la Guerra)
D: Alexandre FuchsDocumentary Feature Competition, El Salvador/U.S.
Thirteen seconds. That's how long a new member of Mara Salvatrucha – the notorious MS-13 – is beaten as his initiation. While the FBI has called this international gang the biggest domestic safety threat, photographer-turned-documentarian Alexandre Fuchs looks beyond the salacious headlines to find out why an estimated 100,000 members worldwide would put themselves through that pummeling. With roots in the El Salvadoran civil war, the group started as a desperate reaction to social injustice. Botched policing strategies across the Americas have accelerated its development into a massive criminal force. It's a brutal tale: Just as Fuchs' lens never turns from the initiation stomping, it never hides the street murders, prison riots, or execution-style murders that seem to swirl ever faster around the gang. But the clearest and saddest critique may come from Ernesto Miranda, the founding member who became one of its most insightful critics. – Richard Whittaker
Saturday, April 19, 8pm, Metropolitan; Tuesday, April 22, 8pm, MetropolitanDocumentary Shorts
D: VariousIt isn't geography that unifies these short docs: It's matters of life and death. "For Them (Por Mis Hijos)" shows that poverty-driven migration from Latin America has reached Europe, as Norma spends a lonely life as a nursemaid in Spain to feed her family in Mexico. By contrast, "American Girls" is the tale of children like Norma's and what life those sacrifices can buy them. But death surrounds "To Live Is a Masterpiece (Vivir Es una Obra Maestra)," director Gabriela Yepes' sometimes frustratingly uncritical (and un-self-critical) love letter to artist and poet Jorge Eielson. His works and impact upon Peruvian art are ethereal but poignant; by contrast, "Alone and Anonymous (Solitário Anônimo)" is visceral. While Yepes keeps Eielson's name alive, Debora Diniz is confronted with a deliberate enigma, a man who has rejected life and even identity in a contemporary and true Whose Life Is It Anyway? But among all this philosophizing, there is some joyous living being done. "I Love Beethoven (Amo Beethoven)" is the story of a bunch of very average teenagers in Venezuela – who also happen to be part of an all-deaf orchestra and choir – and feels like a life-affirming feature-length doc waiting to happen. – Richard Whittaker
Saturday, April 19, 4pm, MetropolitanDrained (O cheiro do ralo)
D: Heitor Dhalia; with Selton Mello, Paula Braun, Lourenço Mutarelli, Fabiana GugliNew Releases, Brazil
If it weren't for the fact that Drained is in Portuguese, viewers would be forgiven for thinking it's an American indie film from the mid-1990s. It fits the bill perfectly, with its cast of quirky but lovable characters, its modest yet colorful set designs, and its reluctant hero, who, like so many small-movie protagonists of that time, excels at a job that has more than a little symbolic relevance to his psychological state (if you're a veterinarian, for example, you have trouble getting along with your fellow man; if you're the kind of person who can't let go of your past, there's a good chance you own an antique shop). The film follows Lourenço (Mello), a pawnshop proprietor whose obsession with the value of other people's possessions speaks to his detachment from the animate objects of this world and his compulsion to stand in judgment of his fellow man as a way of protecting himself from being judged by them. An objectifier to end all objectifiers, Lourenço even manages to reduce his love for a local cafe waitress to the geometrical appreciation of her posterior. It's grand emotional detachment sublimated in erotic synecdoche. – Josh Rosenblatt
Wednesday, April 23, 6pm, Metropolitan
The Fists of a Nation (los Puños de una Nación)
D: Pituka Ortega HeilbronDocumentary Feature Competition, Panama
With all the controversy surrounding the upcoming summer Olympic games in Beijing (over Chinese financial patronage in Darfur, social repression in Tibet, etc.), the issue of politics and sport is once again front-page news. In this excellent documentary, director Ortega Heilbron takes us back to the ideological volatility of the late Seventies and early Eighties, when a young, hard-hitting boxing champion from the streets of Panama City named Roberto Duran (nickname "Manos de Piedra" – "Hands of Stone") became a hero and a symbol not only for his country but for all of Latin America as it fought for its independence in the face of mounting U.S. economic imperialism. Duran's classic matches with American golden boy Sugar Ray Leonard became the stuff of legend, not just because of what transpired inside the ring but for what they meant to a world battling on yet another front of the Cold War. – Josh Rosenblatt
Saturday, April 19, 6pm, Metropolitan
My Mexican Shivah (Morirse Está en Hebreo)
D: Alejandro Springall; with Raquel Pankowsky, David Ostrosky, Blanca Guerra, Sergio Klainer, Sharon Zundel, Emilio Savinni, Enrique Cimet New Releases, MexicoMexican-Jewish comedies are as rare as leavened bread in the Sinai, and thus the very existence of My Mexican Shivah is as much a cause for wonderment and head-scratching as was the burning bush or, barring that, the introduction of a mariachi band into World of Our Fathers. The petty, interfamilial squabbles that descend like a series of seriocomic plagues following the death of boisterous paterfamilias Moishe (Klainer) – who died while dancing the hora, no less – make old Abraham's daily grind look tame in comparison. The weeklong Jewish mourning ritual of sitting shivah is fodder here for both spiritual and earthbound redemption, with Moishe's mishpocha – his children, his shiksa mistress, and in particular, his grandson Nicholás (Savinni), a former libertine-fugitive who returns from the promised land a full-fledged Hasid – primed for the sort of giddy, existential free-for-all Ben Stiller can only dream of. Springall avoids the pitfalls of the genre, such as it is (El Mariachis en los Sephardim?), via a vitally mordant and distinctly Latin touch: the inclusion of a pair of magical-realistic angels, Aleph and Bet (Cimet, Kerlow), who kibitz and tally the deceased's just reward. So one of the lost tribes of Israel landed deep in the heart of mi corazón ... who nu? – Marc Savlov
Thursday, April 17, 9pm, Metropolitan; Monday, April 21, 9:45pm, Alamo South LamarThe Murderer Among Us (El Asesino Entre Nosotros)
D: Daniel Benavides Pinto; with Pilar Loyola Echenique, Estaban Arjel, Rodrigo González, Samuel González, Ignacio Mansilla, Valentina PedrerosNarrative Feature Competition, Chile
It may be a happy accident that this film borrows the working title of Fritz Lang's child-murder masterpiece M: Both are seemingly small crime dramas that actually take a panoramic view of a society. It begins as the grimmest Movie of the Week ever, as sexually precocious and emotionally vulnerable Chilean schoolgirl Valentina (Loloya Echenique) predicts her own death. Balancing school, bar-hopping, and the odd coke-delivery run with her dealer boyfriend (Arjel), she charms and frustrates. But it's her death that gives the film real purpose and savage power as a bleak social commentary. Her blood lubricates the gears of a corrupt machine of drug dealers, an apathetic administration, and a complicit police force. While Valentina's is only the first death, her specter is pervasive, as everyone works together to hide or ignore what really happened to her, and the cover-up becomes more heinous than the crime. – Richard Whittaker
Saturday, April 19, 10pm, Metropolitan
Narrative Shorts 1 and 2
D: VariousFrom the twee (the Kevin Smith-aping nerd love of "Back Issues") to the twisted (the cross-border nightmare "Mexican Dream," which hovers between heaven and hell, Mexico and El Norte), these short stories are sometimes fanciful, but there's a solid slab of politics, as well. Sometimes it's overt, like "Ten Reais (Dez Reais)," the La Ronde-style journey of a 10-reais note through the streets of Brasília that shows exactly what can be bought for 5 bucks: a drink, a life, a meal. It's not all didacticism: "From the Roots (De Pura Cepa)," where weak-willed protagonist Sam (Robert Burgos) is forcibly but happily reconnected with his Puerto Rican roots, laces tart commentary with a twist of romance. When the stridency is put to one side in favor of story, like the bittersweet Mexican road trip "Time to Leave (Tiempo de Partir)," the point is more subtly and poignantly made. But the brightest innovation comes from "Underpass," where the migrant experience is not told through the traditional, now-stereotypical lines of Hispanics vs. Anglos but through the eyes of a Cambodian family, dealing with its own problems. – Richard Whittaker
Narrative Shorts run in two programs; see www.cinelasamericas.org for each program's lineup.Noel: The Samba Poet (Noel: Poeta da Vila)
D: Ricardo Van Steen; with Rafael Raposo, Camila Pitanga, Lidiane Borges, Flávio BauraquiNarrative Feature Competition, Brazil
Noel Rosa changed samba. In the early Thirties, the songwriter became the biggest name in Rio de Janeiro due to his Carnaval hit "Com Que Roupa?" Hundreds of social commentaries disguised as sambas would follow, along with drink, women, and illness. Van Steen's narrative debut, based on Rosa's biography written by Carlos Didier and João Máximo, lives in the Rio nightlife of the Thirties – smoky pool halls, radio stations, and cabarets. Rosa's story is that of a stereotypical rock star, replete with forced marriage, extramarital affairs, excessive alcohol, and rapidly deteriorating health. But where others lived the lifestyle only to die forgotten, Rosa transformed Brazil's national music into a conduit. Those unfamiliar with the Brazilian poet from the Rio neighborhood of Vila Isabel might want to do a little research before viewing the film, but even as fiction, Noel: Poeta da Vila entices like Rosa's blend of wit and irony. – Darcie Stevens
Saturday, April 19, 4pm, MetropolitanNot by Chance (Não Por Acaso)
D: Philippe Barcinski; with Rodrigo Santoro, Leonardo Medeiros, Letícia Sabatella, Branca Messina, Rita Batata, Cássia Kiss, Ney PiacentiniNarrative Feature Competition, Brazil
In the style of Crash and the collected works of Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, Babel), Barcinski's Não Por Acaso explores the way a single event can affect the lives of seemingly disparate people and bind them inextricably together. The event in this case is a car crash in São Paulo, Brazil, that leaves three people dead; those affected include Ênio (Medeiros), a middle-aged employee in the city's traffic-control center, and Pedro (Santoro, late of TV's Lost), a dashing snooker player. It's clear from the film's early going that both men are obsessed with control – Pedro of his technique at the table and Ênio of the wide and unpredictable labyrinth of avenues and on-ramps that constitutes São Paulo's traffic grid – and that the sudden lack of control they feel in the face of that deadly car wreck is going to force them down previously unexplored emotional passageways toward something approaching maturity. – Josh Rosenblatt
Friday, April 18, 9pm, Metropolitan
Saint Death (La Santa Muerte)
D: Eva Aridjis; narrated by Gael García BernalDocumentary Feature Competition, Mexico/U.S.
"The Skinny Girl" is a common moniker for St. Death, whose physical representation is that of a skeleton. Whether the supposed miracle-worker is dressed in a bright-colored dress or a simple cloak, the nickname is apt. The majority of St. Death's 2 million followers lives in Mexico, where the saint's popularity has increased since the Sixties. Aridjis' documentary about this "cult" is frank and nonjudgmental, which is also apt, because much of the saint's adoration comes from her acceptance of those whom the Catholic Church, which does not recognize Skinny as a saint, rejects, among them homosexuals and criminals. Aridjis interviews followers in Tepito, a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood in Mexico City, where many of Skinny's worshippers are sick or in jail and daily visit her altars, praying for protection. A priest explains that these people don't realize they are praying to Satan, that death is punishment for sin. Even he, however, understands St. Death's appeal to the desperate. – Sofia Resnick
Friday, April 18, 7pm, MetropolitanSeptembers (Septiembres)
D: Carles BoschNew Releases (Opening Night Film), Spain
Every September, we are told, the Madrid prison system picks the best singers from each facility to compete in Spain's annual Festival of Song. Spanish filmmaker Bosch focuses on a handful of men and women chosen, cataloging their songs artfully along with their crimes. Arturo, in for drug trafficking, performs a song called "We're Not Crazy" and pines for his wife and sons. Rudolf, the romantic who's in for counterfeiting, sings "19 Days and 500 Nights" for his lady waiting on the outside. Song becomes a way to express loneliness and longing, as with Estefania and Aurora, both serving nine-year sentences and both involved with male inmates. Sounds like the plot of an Almodóvar film in reverse, and it's through his subtle character development that Bosch makes Septiembres more about love and connection than competition. The songs are just the medium through which the human story is told. – Audra Schroeder
Wednesday, April 16, 8pm, ParamountSpecial Circumstances (Circunstancias Especiales)
D: Marianne TelekiDocumentary Feature Competition, U.S./Chile
Héctor Salgado was 16 years old when he was arrested for being an Allende supporter in a country newly overthrown by Pinochet. Salgado's entire soccer team was detained; they were just boys who stole some dynamite from a Pinochet supporter. Salgado was tortured, held for three years, then exiled to America – one of 1 million Chileans displaced during Pinochet's reign. A close friend was executed (3,200 were executed or simply disappeared). Decades later and with the borders finally open again, Salgado determines to track down those who tortured him, sentenced him, even ratted on him (he's working off a list of names from "a book of legal documents"; it's never clear how this book came into his possession). It's fascinating stuff, watching the soft-spoken, dignified Salgado find his voice – and give voice to his rage – as he interviews his former torturers, elderly men now who repeatedly brush him off or urge him to let it go. One of his prey, sitting under a portrait of Pinochet, simply shrugs that there are two truths: "Yours and mine." It's not the kind of thumping vindication we'd hoped for, but the simple act of confrontation is catharsis for a man so long in exile. – Kimberley Jones
Saturday, April 19, 2pm, MetropolitanXXY
D: Lucía Puenzo; with Inés Efron, Martín Piroyansky, Ricardo Darín, Germán Palacios, Valeria Bertuccelli, Carolina Pelleritti, Guillermo AngelelliNew Releases, Argentina
Upon their first meeting, on a quiet beach in Uruguay, 15-year-old Alex (Efron) tells a slightly older Alvaro (Piroyansky) that she jerks off every day. He doesn't get it – not yet – but she is not referring to clitoral or vaginal stimulation but, in fact, to "jerking off." Alex is a hermaphrodite, the evidence hidden beneath her boyishly baggy shorts. At the start of XXY, two weeks' worth of Alex's prescribed hormones, intended to maintain her body's fading femininity, have accumulated in her bedside drawer, prompting a visit from Alvaro's father (Palacios), a plastic surgeon from Argentina – a butcher, Alex says. Puenzo's script, based on Sergio Bizzio's short story "Cinismo," explicitly portrays the emotional and physical consequences of hermaphroditism but is not vulgar nor overdramatic, evidenced by the movie's lack of a violin-laden score. Instead Puenzo allows her characters to emote in silence. She approaches issues of identity – body acceptance, gender confusion, self-love, and self-loathing – with her bare hands, and the result is moving. – Sofia Resnick
Thursday, April 17, 7pm, Metropolitan; Monday, April 21, 8pm, Metropolitan
