What to Watch Online This Week on Cinema Tropical, April 20-27
This week there are several great films to stream: From Eduardo Coutinho‘s A Man Marked for Death / Twenty Years Later, named the best Brazilian documentary film of all time, to the Cuban 1967 picaresque comedy The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin by Julio García Espinosa, and the “inspirational, thought-provoking” (Los Angeles Times) documentary film Ovarian Psycos by Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle, there are plenty of options of great Latin American and U.S. Latinx cinema to watch at home.
And be sure to check out the first six titles from Argentina, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Mexico, in The Cinema Tropical Collection, now streaming on Tropical on Demand. We’ll be announcing new titles shortly!
Films available to stream now:
Daily Recommendation:
A MAN MARKED FOR DEATH / TWENTY YEARS LATER
(Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil, 1984, 119 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
Named the best Brazilian documentary of all-time by the Brazilian Association of Film Critics, Eduardo Coutinho’s Twenty Years Later is a landmark of Latin American cinema, and hailed as one of the greatest metadocumentaries ever made.
SO LONG ENTHUSIASM
The acclaimed debut feature by Colombian filmmaker Vladimir Durán—a favorite at the Berlinale’s Forum and winner of the Best Director and Best Colombian Film awards at the Cartagena Film Festival—is a playful meditation on confinement.
THE ADVENTURES OF JUAN QUIN QUIN
(Julio García Espinosa, Cuba, 1967, 113 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Hailed as revolutionary Cuba’s first feature-length comedy, Julio García Espinosa’s picaresque, parodic and hugely popular adventure film offers a giddily inventive mix of classic movie genres and styles: war, Western, slapstick, musical, gangster, Buñuelian satire, Soviet-style Socialist Realism, and more.
SHAKESPEARE AND VICTOR HUGO’S INTIMACIES
(Intimidades entre Shakespeare y Víctor Hugo, Yulene Olaizola, Mexico, 2008, 80 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Documentary filmmaker Yulene Olaizola’s film is set against the backdrop of her grandmother Rosa Carbajal’s Mexico City boarding house, at the intersection of streets named for two storied scribes. Rosa recalls her encounters with her most memorable tenant, an artist named Jorge Riosse. Sexually ambiguous and mentally ill, Jorge devoted much of his time to his idiosyncratic paintings, and the film deals with his death, his art and circumstantial evidence pointing to his much darker side.
(Gastón Solnicki, Argentina, 2016, 72 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)Hailed as “an eerie high-modernist fable… mightily minimalist, and drop-dead gorgeous” (Olaf Möller, Film Comment), Gastón Sonicki’s
Kékszakállú is an beguiling portrait of several young women at the threshold of adulthood, feeling their way through various crises born of the insular comforts of upper-middle-class life.
The Cinema Tropical Collection: STILL BURN
(Algo quema, Mauricio Alfredo Ovando, Bolivia, 2018, 77 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Winner of the Best Director and FIPRESCI awards at the 2018 Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Still Burn is a courageous, perceptive documentary about how collective and personal memories are created from—and ultimately shape—a complicated legacy.
Daily Recommendation:
OVARION PSYCOS
(Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle, USA, 2016, 72 min. In English)
Winner of a Special Mention for Best U.S. Latinx Film at the Cinema Tropical Awards, Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle’s Ovarian Psycos follows a peculiar ensemble of women that rides at night through streets deemed dangerous in Eastside Los Angeles, and use their bicycles to confront the violence in their lives.
WELCOME TO NEW YORK
(Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff, Chile/Italy/Spain, 2006, 77 min. In English)
(Margo Guernsey, USA, 2018, 56 min. In English and Spanish with English subtitles)
“An immigrant story you probably haven’t seen before” (Cosmopolitan) and “an inspiring and informational documentary that serves both as record and template for what politics and politicians can look like in 2019” (Remezcla), Margo Guernsey’s debut feature is a behind-the-scenes personal and inspiring portrait of councilwoman Carmen Castillo, a full-time hotel housekeeper, and a powerful face of contemporary grassroots politics.
(Todo lo demás, Natalia Almada, Mexico, 2016, 72 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)Selected as one of the best films of the year (Amy Taubin, Artforum), and winner of the Golden Gate Award for Best Film at the San Francisco Film Festival, Natalia Almada’s debut fiction film
Everything Else stars Academy Award–nominated actress Adriana Barraza (Babel) as Doña Flor, a 63-year-old woman living in Mexico City as she awakens from her bureaucratic malaise and yearns to become visible again.
Watch now
(Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada, Dominican Republic, 2014, 86 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Cartagena Film Festival and acclaimed at Visions du Réel, the debut feature by Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada is a poignant chamber piece that delves deeply into divisions of class and race.
AWAY FROM MEANING
(Lejos del sentido, Olivia Luengas, Mexico, 2018, 88 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Awarded the Best Documentary Prize at the Havana Film Festival New York, this deeply personal family love story directed by Liliana’s sister, Olivia, is a poignant meditation about normality and stigma attached to mental illnesses and a portrait of Liliana’s inner world, where her emotions take form.