[Sfbay-video] [Fwd: Political/Labor Films From Mexico Screening In Berkeley At PFA]

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---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Political/Labor Films From Mexico Screening In Berkeley At PFA
From:    "steve zeltzer" <lvpsf at igc.org>
Date:    Sat, October 30, 2004 5:02 pm
To:      "UPPNET2" <lvpsf at igc.org>
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http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/pfa_programs/mexico/index.html
CINE MEXICO:
FRI NOV 12 2004 - SUN DEC 12 2004

The Mexican Revolution was hardly over when it began to be interpreted on
the screen. But did it ever end? Earlier this year we presented Fernando
de Fuentes's searing examination of the Revolution in his celebrated
trilogy from the 1930s. The struggle of class and values was replayed
throughout Mexican cinema's ³Golden Age,² in the melodramas of El Indio
Emilio Fernández and the raw aesthetic power of Gabriel
Figueroa's cinematography, which the painter David Siqueiros called
³murals that travel²; in the rumberas with their Afro-Cuban rhythms,
brothel settings, and moody stars; even in the wildly clever comedies of
Cantinflas and Tin Tan. Our historical survey also includes some
rarities that defy categorization, such as a morphine-laced silent drama
from 1927. As A. O. Scott recently wrote in the New York Times, ³There is
a frankness in these films that would never have passed muster with the
Hays Office.²

Passionate and outspoken by anyone's standards, Mexican popular cinema
shows us the way to the brilliantly subversive films of Luis Buñuel in the
1950s and the resurgence of this bold artistic tradition starting in the
1970s in the hands of Arturo Ripstein, Paul Leduc, Jorge Fons, and Felipe
Cazals. As our series shows, it continues in a new generation in the films
of Dana Rotberg, María Novaro, Maryse Sistach, and Gerardo Tort.

We invite you to join us for PFA's Mexican marathon throughout November
and December.

THU DEC 2 2004
5:30 Canoa (Free Screening!)
<http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/FMPro?-db=WebDB.fp5&-Token=5819&-Token.2=mex
ico&-Token.3=5798&-format=currentfilmnote.html&-error=error.html&-lay=WebFor
m&-find>

True story of college workers attacked by anti-communist mob during
turbulent 1960s. ³A landmark in Mexican cinema.²‹Chicago Reader
CINE MEXICO
<http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/pfa_programs/mexico/index.html>:


THU DEC 2 2004
5:30 Canoa (Free Screening!)
Felipe Cazals (Mexico, 1975)

Free First Thursday screening!
Tickets available at the PFA Theater starting at 4:30pm

In 1968, during the height of Mexico's student uprising and social
upheaval, a group of university workers on a hiking trip were assaulted by
a hysterical mob in the town of San Miguel Canoa. Five people died. Canoa,
constructed as a faux documentary, complete with an onscreen narrator,
revisits this tragedy to unveil a reactionary system of
clerical abuse, rural poverty, and anti-Communist hysteria. Cazals's
narrator takes viewers first into Canoa by day, where erosion has
created a town of dirt and stone, and where a possibly corrupt priest
exhorts his flock to be vigilant against provocateurs; and then into Canoa
by night, where five visiting college employees attract suspicion, anger,
and finally death. Made only seven years after the actual event, Canoa is
for critic Carl J. Mora ³the most powerful and unsettling statement on
Mexico's bloody repression of 1968.² Part historical
document, part true-life horror film, the terrifying images of mob
violence, manipulated anger, and attacked innocents remain as
frightening now as they were then.

Jason Sanders

Written by Tomás Pérez Turrent. Photographed by Alex Phillips, Jr. With
Ernesto Gómez Cruz, Enrique Lucero, Salvador Sánchez, Roberto Sosa, Sr.
(115 mins, In Spanish with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)


THU DEC 2 2004
7:45 The Change
<http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/FMPro?-db=WebDB.fp5&-Token=5821&-Token.2=mex
ico&-Token.3=5798&-format=currentfilmnote.html&-error=error.html&-lay=WebFor
m&-find>

(Regular Admission.) Sixties radicalism meets environmental justice. Two
radicals battle factory pollution in this bitter allegory of dropping out,
and fighting back.

CINE MEXICO
<http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/pfa_programs/mexico/index.html>:


FRI DEC 3 2004
6:30 Bricklayers
<http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/FMPro?-db=WebDB.fp5&-Token=5823&-Token.2=mex
ico&-Token.3=5798&-format=currentfilmnote.html&-error=error.html&-lay=WebFor
m&-find>

Jorge Fons's chilling exposé of labor exploitation won him Best Director
at the Berlin Film Festival. A worker is killed on a construction site,
and the investigation discovers a web of economic and political
corruption. CINE MEXICO
<http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/pfa_programs/mexico/index.html>:

FRI DEC 3 2004
6:30 Bricklayers
Jorge Fons (Mexico, 1976)

(Los Albañiles, a.k.a. The Building Workers). Mexico's hidden class codes
and conflicts are ruthlessly exposed in this clever murder
mystery, winner of the Best Director award for Jorge Fons at the 1976
Berlin Film Festival. A night watchman at a construction site is
brutally murdered; when the police investigate they find that the murder
is only the beginning. A web of corruption spreads from bottom to top,
from a thieving foreman to an inept engineer, all the way to the company
owner, if only the police can be bothered to look. Veteran actor Ignacio
López Tarso (also seen in Macario) lends his grizzled presence to this
tale of labor unrest and worker oppression, anchoring Fons's constantly
shifting parallel narratives with a toughness as considerable as the
setting itself.
Written by Fons, Vicente Leñero, Luis Carrion, based on a story by Leñero.
Photographed by Alex Phillips, Jr. With Ignacio López Tarso, Jaime
Fernandez, David Silva, Katy Jurado. (113 mins, In Spanish with English
subtitles, Color, 35mm)


SAT DEC 4 2004
7:00 Reed: Insurgent Mexico
<http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/FMPro?-db=WebDB.fp5&-Token=5829&-Token.2=mex
ico&-Token.3=5798&-format=currentfilmnote.html&-error=error.html&-lay=WebFor
m&-find>

Paul Leduc's account of writer John Reed's involvement in the Mexican
Revolution brings home revolutionary realities.

SAT DEC 4 2004
7:00 Reed: Insurgent Mexico
Paul Leduc (Mexico, 1971)

(Reed: Mexico insurgente). This fictionalized account of John Reed's press
coverage of and eventual participation in the Mexican Revolution explores
the tenuous line that divides the detached objective observer from the
committed man of action. Amos Vogel, in The Village Voice, noted: ³Reed is
a work of great subtlety. We enter, stage by stage, into the true
realities of the Mexican revolution: its lulls and confusions, fallible
leaders, unexpected death, sudden friendships, meandering half-action.
This is what it must have been like. The sentiment is anti-convention,
anti-folklore, anti-heroism; therefore, closer to revolutionary reality.²
Paul Leduc's first major feature, Reed:
Insurgent Mexico won the Georges Sadoul prize for best film by a new
director.
Written by Leduc, Juan Tovar, from the book Insurgent Mexico by John Reed.
Photographed by Alexis Grivas. With Claudio Obregón, Eduardo López Rojas,
Ernesto Gómez Cruz, Juan Angel Martínez. (110 mins, In Spanish with
English subtitles, Sepia, 35mm)


SAT DEC 4 2004
9:10 Frida
<http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/FMPro?-db=WebDB.fp5&-Token=5831&-Token.2=mex
ico&-Token.3=5798&-format=currentfilmnote.html&-error=error.html&-lay=WebFor
m&-find>

Leduc paints an intense, imagistic portrait of Kahlo's turbulent life and
times.


FRI DEC 10 2004
7:30 The Beginning and the End
Arturo Ripstein (Mexico, 1993)

(Principio y fin). Arturo Ripstein based this compelling family drama on a
novel by Egyptian Nobel Prize­winner Naguib Mahfouz, but transposed the
story of the interplay between hope and poverty to a Mexico of
overwhelming social inequality. The mother, Ignacia, at once tender and
cruel, knows that to survive in this world you must put up a false front
of success and be willing to destroy others. The film relates the
intertwined lives of the four children Ignacia has to support when her
husband's death leaves the family destitute. Her survival strategy is to
demand that three of the children sacrifice their own desires to put the
fourth through college. But the family, instead of becoming the last
redoubt of civilization, is revealed as the destroyer of dreams. With
screenwriter Paz Alicia Garcíadiego, Ripstein deconstructs Motherhood, the
Family, Bourgeois Dreams, and even Mexican Melodrama with his highly
artifical and distanced use of pathos.

Jorge Ruffinelli, SFIFF 1994

Written by Paz Alicia Garcíadiego, based on the novel by Naguib Mahfouz.
Photographed by Claudio Rocha. With Ernesto Laguardia, Julieta Egurrola,
Bruno Bicher, Lucía Muñoz. (183 mins, In Spanish with English subtitles,
Color, 35mm)



Screening now!

"We Interrupt This Empire..."

http://www.videoactivism.org/empire.html

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"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."
"Sentimento sin acción es la aniquilación del alma."
--Edward Abbey

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