Category Movies

Entries 5 Total

Chile takes Sundance

Jan 30, ’12 11:57 PM

Latin America may have gotten swept at the Oscars this year, but it – or at least Chile – did OK at Sundance. Two Chilean films won awards: Violeta se fue a los cielos, which has been making the rounds rather loudly for awhile now, and one I’d never heard of, Joven & Alocada.

The latter is the first film by Marialy Rivas, both co-written and directed. It won the World Cinema Screenwriting Award, and I have to say from just the trailer that it looks like a pretty fair choice:

Interesting how the experience of growing up in an anti-erotic religious home is so pan-cultural. Although her anti-erotic upbringing looks like it was way, way more fun than mine, so maybe never mind. Looking forward to seeing this one.

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“We took advantage of a certain moment”

Jan 28, ’12 12:42 PM


Intrigued by the trailer for Juan de los Muertos, the first-ever Cuban zombie movie, I dropped a line to one of the co-producers, Gervasio Iglesias with La Zanfoña Producciones in Spain. Here’s what we talked about:

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LatAm shut out of Oscar nominations

Jan 25, ’12 12:19 AM

After some pretty strong showings in recent years, with films like El Secreto de sus Ojos, La Teta Asustada, and Biutiful, Latin American films have been completely shut out of this year’s Academy Award nominations.

Mexico’s Miss Bala was supposed to be competitive, but no dice. Anyway, these are the people who voted Driving Miss Daisy, Titanic, and Crash best picture, so should anyone give a damn?

The blog Cine Latino has a nice list of Latin American films that were contenders, so at least the Oscar competition gives us a lineup of films to reluctantly pirate over the next few months as we are frustrated in our efforts to view them legally.

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Dawn, Shaun… Juan?

Jan 23, ’12 11:45 AM

Juan de los Muertos, the first ever Cuban zombie movie, hit theaters in Spain this month. It is something of a knock-off, but aren’t all zombie movies?

I enjoy Cuban humor, and this seems to have it going on. And they didn’t have to change Havana much to make it look post-apocalyptic. The budget was $2.3mn, which according to the movie’s publicity material went mostly for post production special effects. Interestingly, the movie was produced independently, by Producciones La 5ta Avenida, which is incorporated in Bolivia.

The director is Argentine Alejandro Brugués, and everyone involved seems to have studied at Havana’s various film schools. It is about to be released more widely: Focus Features just picked it up for distribution in the US.

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Ranchers and Indians

Jan 15, ’12 2:04 AM

I just got around to watching Birdwatchers, a 2010 film by Italian/Chilean/Argentine/Brazilian director Marco Bechis about a group of Guarani-Kaiowà indigenous people in Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state who decide to take back their ancestral land from a rancher.

It is not a Hollywood fantasy, not Avatar, not Dances with Wolves, not a feel-good movie, not an Oscar-grade downer of a movie, not pretty, but still gorgeous. It has a strong sense of place, doesn’t edit out the mud and toads and thick air of the Amazon. There are no cartoon bad guys, there are no cartoon good guys, and because of this you can never be quite sure what will happen next, which I like.

At its heart, it is character-driven and humanizing, and at its other heart it is a text-book case of how these kinds of things go: 1) Indigenous pushed off ancestral land and onto a reservation by farmers; 2) their way of life is ruined and they become a) slaves, b) starving, c) dead; 3) they try to take back their land; 4) powerful people with guns/lawyers stop/kill them.  Human rights professors teaching units on collective and indigenous rights should start classes with this movie, because it has happened exactly like this all across the Americas (the world?) for centuries.

Amazingly, it is available on iTunes.

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