From legendary director Felipe Cazals, a historical drama of the last days of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Despite defeating the Texans of the Alamo, he lost the war of Texas Independence and gave away half of Mexico (including Texas, New Mexico, and Oregon). Exiled from his homeland, he is allowed to return only a few years before dying in 1976. At the end of his life, he still clings to illusions of regaining his former glory and popularity.
Category: Politics
Based on Sam Greenlee’s novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door tells the story of Black CIA agent hired to showcase agency integration in order to boost a white senator’s re-election campaign. After going undercover as a Black nationalist, he abandons the agency in order to train young recruits in Chicago to become urban guerrillas. Though filmed mostly in Gary, Indiana due to Mayor Daley’s personal distaste for the subject matter, the landscape of Chicago casts a strong shadow over the movie.
If one were to select the ten most significant events in American history, there would be no doubt that the death of President John F. Kennedy would be among the list. This is not only because of the fact that one of America’s most visionary presidents was cut down in the prime of his life, but because almost 60 years later after the fact, his assasination continues to be shrouded with mystery and controversy. This documentary presents the facts surrounding the events before, and ather that horrific moment in Dallas, and includes interviews of those who were on the scene not only at the tragic sight of the murder of JFK, but also a number of individuals who possess firsthand knowledge of everything from the politics of the day to the actualy autopsy performed on the president.
Along a railroad in the south of the former Zaire UN troups discover a few thousand refugees from Rwanda. The camps for the survivors are being massacred a little later on April 25th 1997 by the so-called liberating rebel army of the new “Democratic Republic” of Kongo – and nobody has seen this in the evening news.
Coraje narrates the last years in the life of María Elena Moyano, a black leader from Villa El Salvador (Lima, Peru), organizer of the local feminist movement, who received the Prince of Asturias Award and who was assassinated by the Communist Party Sendero Luminoso in 1992.
Singing on the Treadmill is a surreal operetta parody about the realities of day-to-day socialism. The film is set in a vast garbage dump where, in the depths of a quarry, next to a derelict factory building, two librettists are penning a frothy operetta about the paternalism of Kadarism, its lies, reality perceived through rose tinted glasses and squabbles over a housing allocation. However, their lacquered players are not prepared to bend to their will, they take offence and start demanding independence, rejecting ‘orders from above’ about partners and housing. Gyula Gazdag’s grotesque parody that works on several levels is amusing and dream-like, full of free-flowing associations and remarkable solutions. Citing its “disheartening existentialism”, the authorities banned the film for 10 years.
The day that Pier Paolo Pasolini was killed, Glauber Rocha decided to make this film about the life of Christ in the Third World. Starting from a dialectical synthesis between capitalism and socialism, and a search of interracial relationships in Brazil, Rocha created a work of religious and prophetic tone that results in a kind of bewilderment contemplative, now lyrical, now frantic, soaked in a new messianism. In his last film, the director proposed a tune of sounds and images that build a picture of Brazil and a portrait of himself.
A Greek-American filmmaker, known simply as «A», returns to his hometown in northern Greece for a screening of his latest controversial film. His real reason for coming back, however, is to track down three long-missing reels of film by Greece’s pioneering Manakia brothers who in the early years of cinema traveled through the Balkans, ignoring national and ethnic strife and recording ordinary people, especially craftsmen, on film. Their images, he believes, hold the key to lost innocence and essential truth, to an understanding of Balkan history.