What to Watch Online this Week on Cinema Tropical
This week there’s plenty of excellent Latin American documentaries available to stream nationally, courtesy of two of New York’s leading non-fiction film festivals: Art of the Real and DOC NYC.
Film at Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real, is presenting five Latin American nonfiction and hybrid films. To start, take a look at La vida en común by Ezequiel Yanco, an Argentine hybrid documentary about an indigenous community’s allegorical struggle with a puma that’s terrorizing its livestock. Set in Northern Argentina, Yanco portrays a land of mythic beasts and legendary creatures.
From there, head over to Jonathan Perel‘s Corporate Accountability,
another Argentine production that examines the participation of corporations in the country’s brutal military dictatorship that lasted from 1976 to 1983. With the tense air of a conspiracy thriller, the film details a history that is all too real, and all too present.
And don’t miss the chance to catch this year’s Latin American selections at DOC NYC, presented by Cinema Tropical, streaming through this Thursday,
November 19. Use code DOCNYC20-TROPICAL and get a special ticket discount.
Films Available to Stream Now:
Latin American Films at Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real:
CORPORATE ACCOUNTABILITY
(Responsabilidad empresarial, Jonathan Perel, Argentina, 2020, 68 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Available to rent through Friday, November 20
THE FACULTIES
(Las facultades, Eloisa Soláas, Argentina, 2019, 82 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Available to rent through Friday November 20
LA VIDA EN COMÚN
(Ezequiel Yanco, 2019, Argentina/France, 70m Spanish with English subtitles)
Available to rent through Friday, November 20
I NEVER CLIMBED THE PROVINCIA
(Nunca subí el Provincia, Ignacio Agüero, Chile, 2019, 92 min. In Spanish with English Subtitles)
Available to rent from November 20 to 27
CENOTE
(Kaori Oda, Japan/Mexico, 2019, 75 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Available to rent from November 20 to 26
THOSE THAT, AT A DISTANCE, RESEMBLE ANOTHER
(Jessica Sarah Rinland, 2019, UK/Argentina/Spain, 67 min. In English, Spanish, and Portuguese with English subtitles)
Available to rent from November 20 to 26
NOTES, IMPRINTS (ON LOVE), PART 2: CARMELA
(Alexandra Cuesta, 2020, USA/Ecuador, 6min.)
Screening with Here for Life by Andrea Luka Zimmerman & Adrian Jackson
Available to rent from November 20 to 26
Latin American Films at DOC NYC 2020:
A LA CALLE
(Nelson G. Navarrete and Maxx Caicedo, USA, 2020, 110 min. In Spanish and English with English subtitles)
EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF
(Mo Scarpelli, Venezuela, UK, Italy, USA, Canada, 2020, 105 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
FIVE YEARS NORTH
(Zach Ingrasci and Chris Temple, USA, 2020, 88 min. In Spanish and English with English subtitles)
LA MADRINA: THE SAVAGE LIFE OF LORINE PADILLA
(Raquel Cepeda, USA, 2020, 81 min. In English and Spanish with English subtitles)
LANDFALL
(Cecilia Aldarondo, USA, 2020, 93 min. In English and Spanish with English subtitles)
THE BROTHERS
(Los hermanos, Jarmel and Ken Schneider, USA, 2020, 83 min. In English and Spanish with English subtitles)
MIRACLE FISHING
(Miles Hargrove, USA, 2020, 107 min. In English, Spanish and German with English subtitles)
MISSING IN BROOKS COUNTY
(Lisa Molomot and Jeff Bemiss, USA, 2020, 80 min. In English and Spanish with English subtitles)
OFF THE ROAD
(José Permar, USA, 2020, 78 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENEZUELA
(Érase una vez en Venezuela, Anabel Rodríguez Ríos, Venezuela, 2020, 99 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
SONGS OF REPRESSION
(Estephan Wagner and Marianne Hougen-Moraga, Denmark/The Netherlands, 2020, 88 min. In German and Spanish with English subtitles)
STATELESS
(Michèle Stephenson, USA/Canada, 2020, 95 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
THE LAST OUT
(Sami Khan and Michael Gassert, USA, 2020, 84 min. In Spanish and English with English subtitles)
THE MOLE AGENT
(El agente topo, Maite Alberdi, Chile/USA/Germany/ Spain, 2020, 90 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
THINGS WE DARE NOT DO
(Cosas que no hacemos, Bruno Santamaría, Mexico, 2020, 71 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
THROUGH THE NIGHT
(Loira Limbal, USA, 2020, 72 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Streaming through Thursday, November 19
The Cinema Tropical Collection:
WIÑAYPACHA
(Eternity, Óscar Catacora, Peru, 2017, 86 min. In Aymara with English subtitles)
In a stone hut, over 5000m high in the snow-capped Peruvian Andes, the elderly Phaxsi and her husband Willka eke out a living far from the modern world. The 96 perfectly framed scenes flow gently like still life paintings, depicting the couple, their animals, and their magnificent mountain homeland. In traditional Aymara rituals they beseech Pachamama, Mother Earth, to provide them with sustenance, and to return the long-lost son who has abandoned them for the city, but the struggle to survive eventually prompts a dangerous mission for help. In this stunning and heart-breaking story about abandonment of the elderly and of traditions, Willka is played by the director’s real life grandfather, and Phaxsi by a non-professional who had never seen a film before.
Virtual Theatrical Release:
DIVINE LOVE
(Divino Amor, Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil, 2019. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro’s (Neon Bull) Divine Love (Divino Amor) world premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim and intense audience reactions. Sure to surprise and provoke, definitely recommended for adult-viewing only. It’s the year 2027 in this dystopian, fluorescent Sci Fi story of Joana (Brazilian star Dira Paes), who uses her bureaucratic job to convince divorcing couples to stay together. Her secret weapon is Divine Love, an evangelical cult she belongs to that mixes in a little swinging and group fun into its more traditional prayers and services. Joana herself can’t seem to get pregnant by her own husband, but in an attempt to save her own marriage, she prays regularly at a very unusual religious drive-in, looking for a miracle to help her conceive. Divine Love is an amped up, sexy and witty take on a future full of dance parties, ritualistic orgies, cults and fundamentalist Christianity, and a critique of today’s right-wing led Brazil.
Daily Recommendation:
A PAPER TIGER
(Un tigre de papel, Luis Ospina,
Colombia, 2007, 115 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Luis Ospina’s healthy skepticism of revolutionary dogma is also reflected in a feature-length film essay, Un tigre de papel (A Paper Tiger, 2007), about the Colombian collage artist, poet and sometime revolutionary, Pedro Manrique Figueroa. PMF, as he is sometimes referred to in the film, disappeared without a trace in 1981, but is also an enigma because virtually no images of the artist or many of his collages survive. Two of his found footage films do exist and are included in the essay, along with footage from various Communist propaganda films, newsreels and interviews with contemporaries. Born in 1934, and strongly influenced by the murder of leftist politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948, when he was a ticket collector on a tram, we learn that Figueroa was trained as a professional revolutionary in East Germany in the 1960s. He travelled to Eastern Europe and China, but also spent a good portion of his life homeless, an intellectual who floated in and out of Bogotá’s coffee house scene, distributing homemade pamphlets, leaflets and collages, which reflected his own strange mixture of Communist, Socialist and Maoist ideologies with a healthy dose of sexuality. Ospina’s portrait of an artist who never quite fit in is also, then, a social and political history of Colombia’s turbulent past.
Cultural Office of the French Embassy Presents:
RESSACA
(Vertige de la chute, Vincent Rimbaux and Patrizia Landi, Brazil/France, 2018, 84 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
After years of growth and hope, Brazil collapsed. From 2009, the year when Rio de Janeiro won the dispute to host the Olympics, to 2017, chaos replaced the prospect of a glorious future. The last 15 years have been marked by the expectations that the big events would be the peak of Brazil’s economic growth and bring international recognition as a world power, but it has never happened. Ten days after the end of the games, the country saw the former president Dilma Roussef undergo an impeachment process and since then, there has been a major political and economical crisis, the worst since the dictatorship period. All regions have felt the impact, specially Rio. The city, which is a worldwide reference, is bankrupt. Ressaca, in black and white, chooses as its characters, the artistes and the public employees of the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Theater to show the dark side of a city in contradiction with its clichés. Rio de Janeiro’s Teatro Municipal is the jewel of the nation’s opera scene but it is on the brink of collapse: the state is bankrupt and can no longer pay the employees’ salaries. The workers resist with all their might and try to save the theatre. Just before the 2020 International Emmy Awards ceremony, we are pleased to invite you to discover Ressaca, a moving documentary on the story of the financial crisis in Brazil, nominated in the Arts Programming category at the IEMMYS.
Streaming free through the end of November
Daily Recommendation:
THURSDAY TILL SUNDAY
(De jueves a domingo, Dominga Sotomayor, Chile/Netherlands, 2012, 96 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
This Chilean road movie is set entirely in and around the car belonging to a middle-class family on a four-day trip to the north of Chile. It will be their last journey as a family. We occasionally catch a glimpse of marital problems, but the crisis is largely implicit. For instance, we often only see the backs of the silent parents’ heads, seen from the perspective of the children in the back seat, who only have a partial idea of what is going on. The journey that starts so cheerfully with all kinds of games in the car quickly acquires melancholy undertones: the children only want to go to the beach, while the father is heading for a new life in another apartment and the mother primarily yearns for a place which no longer exists, where everything remains the same as it was.
Daily Recommendation:
SO MUCH WATER
(Tanta agua, Ana Guevara and Leticia Jorge, Uruguay/Mexico/ Netherlands, 2013, 102 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Alberto has lost custody of his children in a divorce, but is determined to keep his bonds with Lucia and Federico. For his visitation week, he plans a vacation to a hot springs resort, but as soon as he picks up Lucia and Federico from their mother’s home, it begins to rain. And rain. And rain! It does not stop raining, and Alberto’s plans for creating quality family memories are washed away in the cramped cabin he has rented, which does little to remedy the adolescent resentments and rebellion of Lucia, and the boredom of Federico. The unique, wry humor of the Uruguayan character brings a richness to this wonderfully atmospheric tale of a father and a daughter trying to find a common ground.