Because there are so many films and programs, I try to focus on one aspect of the festival each year. The festival began with a focus on student films by Mexican and Mexican American filmmakers. Since those early years, it has expanded to include Latino films from around the globe (Argentina, Spain, Cuba, Brazil, and more), and from diverse segments of the Latino population - Mexican and Argentine Jews, gays, women, and Latino Americans. The films also span all genres from documentaries to shorts, animation to horror, experimental to Hollywood backed indies. So this year I thought I would go back to the festival's roots and focus primarily on the films from Mexico. This also seemed a good choice since Arturo Ripstein will be screening a new film and there will be restored prints of a pair of Mexican sci-fi cult classics.
Arturo Ripstein's latest film, Carnaval de Sodoma (IMCIME)
Let's start with Arturo Ripstein. Ripstein, a third generation Mexican of Polish and Russian Jewish descent, grew up on his father's movie sets. But when he was old enough to make his own movies he rejected the style of his country's popular melodramas and opted for a more experimental approach to cinema. With films like The Holy Office, Deep Crimson, No One Writes the Colonel and the digitally shot Such is Life, Ripstein has established himself as Mexico's premier filmmaker.
In more than three decades of filmmaking, Ripstein has delivered a series of dark, iconoclastic and often wickedly funny films. He has challenged the Church in The Holy Office and government corruption in In For Life . He has also displayed a preference for social outcasts in various stages of desperation and usually trapped in a dysfunctional family. In Castle of Purity, an authoritarian father locks his family in their home to keep the outside world from contaminating them; in Hell Hath No Limits , a male transvestite, his daughter and a macho truck driver form an odd menage a trois; and in Deep Crimson , a mother leaves her two young children to the church so that she can follow her lover on a murderous spree, which includes knocking off a widow with a statue of the Virgin Mary.
When I interviewed Ripstein in 2000, he said, "When I was a young director I always thought it was intolerance that I talked about. Now I notice it is family relations, and likes and dislikes within close knit groups. But that would be the stories I talk about, the manner I talk about these things is constantly going against constructed order."
Going against constructed order-- whether it's the narrative conventions of the cinema or the social values championed by the Church and State-- has its price. But Ripstein remains philosophical.
"One of my films was never released ever in Mexico," he recalled, "Fortunately, it was probably the worst film I ever did. So I was very thankful for the exquisite taste of the military that were the ones that forbade the film. So I have encountered my lot of censorship. It's horrifying but it makes you sly. It makes you have to walk like a reptile around the obstacles and that can be stimulating. Sometimes these issues of not being able to say the things you want can make you say them in a much more ferocious manner even though it is not ostensible."
Although Ripstein is all too familiar with conventional censorship in his native Mexico, he says economic censorship pervades film markets the world over. And that often prompts filmmakers to give up on ideas that have been deemed "uncommercial" by potential backers. The pressure to make popular entertainment can have a chilling effect on creativity says Ripstein but he's hopeful that new technology will lessen the impact of such economic restrictions.
"Digital cinema will democratize film like painting is democratic or writing," he said, "Anyone with a pencil can write a sonnet, only the good ones remain of course. A country that has an output of 8-10 films a year will now for the same cost be able to put out 20-25 films a year, which is important. A lot of trash will come of that. But I am positive that the Mozart of Mexico will be born with this technology."
But getting this new Mozart of Mexico into the international film market will still prove a challenge because Hollywood dominates the field so thoroughly. Ripstein says filmmakers like himself face distribution challenges in the local arena and these problems are only intensified internationally because American product fills theaters worldwide.
"Every filmmaker in the world is an outsider in his own country because Hollywood has made us so. I mean I feel like a foreign filmmaker in Mexico, which is very strange. It's been done to us. American films, which are only local in the U.S. are the local films everywhere in the world."
But Ripstein isn't interested in that kind of filmmaking job and that's why he's staying put in Mexico: "Belonging to a certain country within a certain system locked in a certain period of time that makes you say what you have to say. You are inevitably from where you are and from a certain time and you can't be more modern than what you are but you can be a little more ancient."
The women of Carnaval de Sodoma (IMCINE)
His latest film, Carnival of Sodom/El Carnaval de Sodoma (screening March 12 and 15) tackles some of Ripstein's favorite themes: the Church and corrupt officials. This film is set in a Mexican brothel run by a Chinese man. The film focuses on the residents and clients as they prepare their costumes for the local carnival. The film is broken into parallel chapters, each focusing on a different character or set of characters. The film doesn't cover any new terrain for Ripstein - which some may complain about - but its terrain that he knows well. His marvelous sense of character and dark humor comes through in a scene between a prostitute and the wife of one of her clients. Every day the two sit side by side in church and pray for the other and all the horrible things each is doing to the man they are sharing. They hurl insults and irony at each other but indirectly through their "prayers" to the Virgin Mary. It's a classic Ripstein scene. Ripstein also ends on a darkly comic note as murders are committed and the Church offers absolution.
If you want to see a more daring Ripstein film, check out one of his earlier works being showcased at the festival, Hell Hath No Limts/El Lugar Sin Limites (March 16) made in 1978, and pushing the limits of Mexican cinema at that time by dealing with an openly gay character who manages to emerge as the hero of the film. This is a film you do not want to miss.
Lorena Velazquez (she would be the one on the right, in case you can't tell) in Ship of Monsters (UNAM)
The festival also reaches back into the vaults to find a pair of sci-fi cult classics starring Lorena Velazquez. I have to give a hearty thanks to festival curator Patric Stillman for introducing me to her work. That's what I love about festivals, discovering something new. This year's festival presents a tribute to Velazquez as it showcases restored versions of two of her films: the 1966 El Planeta de las Mujeres Invasoras/Planet of Invading Women (March 7) and the 1960 La Nave de Los Monstruos/Ship of Monsters (March 14). Velazquez is the daughter of famous Mexican character actor Victor Velazquez, and she was Miss Mexico in 1960. She made a splash in the sic-fi fantasy world playing vampires and female wrestlers. And at 70, I'm told she's still acting.
I have to confess that I previewed the two films without subtitles (the restored prints are both subtitled and IO plan to see both films again at the festival), and I don't speak Spanish. But despite this hindrance, I fell in love with the films. In El Planeta de las Mujeres Invasoras, Velazquez plays an evil alien queen and her good twin. Velazquez will be at the 8pm screening on Friday March 7 so I urge people to attend and take delight in this cult charmer and its star. Screening the following week but without Velazquez' presence is the better of the two films, La Nave de Los Monstruos. Even though there weren't subtitles, I didn't need much Spanish to follow a story about two women from Venus (Velazquez and Ana Bertha Lepe) landing in Mexico in search of a man to help them repopulate their planet. The man they set their sights on is a singing Mexican cowboy (Lalo Gonzales "Piporro.") with a flair for exaggeration. You'll find deliciously low budget sets Ed Wood would die for; a know-it-all robot; babes in bathing suit space uniforms; and a refreshing Mexican take on American sci-fi conventions. Listen for the cheesy sci-fi sound effects too. This film isn't really in the so-bad-it's-good Plan 9 From Outer Space mode but rather it's just a playful, good-natured, refreshingly innocent and utterly charming take on the sci-fi B movie.
Okay after flying about the galaxy with gorgeous space babes, you may be forced to crash land in the harsh real world of contemporary Mexico City with a pair of films that tackle the growing class divide. Gael Garcia Bernal makes his feature directing debut with Deficit (March 9), a film about a weekend party thrown by a couple of rich kids who discover that their financial security is not that secure. Garcia Bernal plays Cristobal, a rich, somewhat snobby kid who comes home for a weekend of liquor, sex, drugs and music. He tries to present himself as a nice guy who's polite to the help but when the gardener sets his sights on the same visiting Argentine girl (Luz Cipriota) as him, the class divide and the distinction between master and servant becomes clear.
The film was made through the production company Garcia Bernal set up with his co-star from Y Tu Mama Tambien , Diego Luna. Luna also makes his directing debut at the festival as well but with the documentary J.C. Chavez (March 16) about the famous Mexican boxer. Garcia Bernal has worked with some great directors (including Almodovar, Walter Salles, and Alfonso Cuaron), and he seems to have picked up a few things from them. His film has strong performances and some nicely observed moments but it ends up feeling a little thin with its themes not fully fleshed out. Garcia Brenal proves himself - at least at this point in time - a better actor than director as he makes us care about this rather selfish young man who comes to some painful realizations over the course of the weekend.
Rodrigo Pla's directing debut La Zona (Wild Bunch)
Dealing with class in a much more effective manner is La Zona (March 7, 8 and 9), the feature directing debut of Rodrigo Pla. The opening shot succinctly sets up the class divide as the camera moves from inside a clean gated community and up over the high wall and barbed wire to look down on the cramped, rundown homes on the other side of the barricade. Security cameras top the fences and watch to make sure no one from the outside gets in. Calling this a "gated community" is not entirely accurate. It looks more like a fortress with massive metal gates protecting the rich homeowners from the riff raff outside. But a thunderstorm causes a freak accident and power outage that allows a trio of youth to infiltrate the fortress and attempt a robbery. What follows is a tale of vigilante justice as the residents take the law into their own hands to get revenge on the would be robbers. It's a chilling tale that doesn't draw characters in simple black and white terms.
Finding grim humor in death is at the heart of Morirse en Domingo/To Die on Saturday (March 8 and 14). The film opens with a young boy's uncle passing away. Since the death occurs on a Sunday, when some institutions are closed, the family will need to spend a little extra money to grease the wheels and get things taken care of on the weekend. But that's not the only irregularity one can find in the Mexican death industry - bodies are sold, lost and traded, forged documents abound, and it just seems difficult to get the dead into the ground or into an urn. A morbid tale that might appeal to the Six Feet Under Crowd.
Also on the dark side are a pair of horror/supernatural tales: Kilometro 31 (March 7 and 10) and Hasta el Viento Tiene Miedo (March 8 and 12).
And to just sneak a few non-Mexican films into this preview, I did get to screen a pair of Cuban documentaries that are worth checking out. The Hands of Che Guevara - from Netherlands - sets out on a journey to find out what happened to Che's hands. His body disappeared after his death in 1967 and wasn't found until three decades later. But when the body was unearthed, it was missing its hands. This prompted filmmaker Peter De Kock to try and find out what happened. The search for Che's hands is the overt subject of film but as De Kock interviews many people who have first person accounts of different pieces of the puzzle, the film develops into something else. It's a study of subjective memory - what each person remembers, how each embellishes the story - and how all these subjective memories fit or don't fit together. It's also a film that explores how Che's image and personality persist and resonate today.
Vivian Lesnik Weisman's documentary portrait of her father. (Latino Vision)
The Man from two Havanas (March 15) is a documentary by Vivien Lesnik Weisman about her father Max Lesnik, a Cuban revolutionary and journalist, and a former classmate of Fidel Castro. In exploring her relationship with her father she explores Cuban history and the complex emotions for those living in exile. She also gives us a perspective of what it's like to be a Cuban living in America and vocally expressing political opinions about your former homeland. The film offers a very personal perspective on bigger political events. Although Weisman sometimes imposes too much of herself and her too cutely framed personal questions, the film is ultimately a forceful and compelling work that provides insight into the complexities of the Cuban and Cuban American experience.
And finally I just want to highlight a few of the short films programmed throughout the festival. On March 8 Cine Mujer highlights short films about women, including the devastating Under Their Skirts. This short film by Latinos but about women in Africa reveals the increased globalization of the festival and the way Latino filmmakers are extending the bounds of their interests. In the Cine-mation showcase of animated shorts there is the stunning Tyger (March 11), loosely inspired by Blake's poem. It's a work that combines animation and puppets as it takes us through a night in Sao Paolo. It will fill you with wonder. There's also a showcase of shorts by local filmmakers, including one called Sleep by Omar DeLeon. I have seen his earlier student work and based on the quality and innovation displayed in them, I am looking forward to his latest work screening on March 12.
Well there's a lot more that worth's checking out but part of the fun of the festival is being surprised. So put a few films on a list of definites that you want to check out and then go on a few occasions and just buy a ticket for whatever happens to be screening when you arrive. That's how I have discovered gems that I might never have thought to seek out.
Be listening to Morning Edition on Monday for a festival update.
