A film on the lives of three women who live in contemporary Cuba.
Copies: 1 (DVD+R); Length: 106 minutes
A film on the lives of three women who live in contemporary Cuba.
Copies: 1 (DVD+R); Length: 106 minutes
Habanastation is a 2011 Cuban drama film directed by Ian Padron. Filmed in a slum in western Havana, the film addresses inequalities in Cuba through the relationship between two children of different social strata. The film was selected as the Cuban entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards.
Copies: 1 (DVD+R); Length: 115 minutes
Cuba, 1993. Eunice, a motherless teenager, seeks to escape her father’s sexual harassment. So, she seeks out her sister who lives in a town near the capital. Alejandro, a young rock ‘n’ roll singer, is tired of being discriminated against. And after robbing a pharmacy, he departs for Havana with a pair of friends. Fate intertwines the lives of the two teenagers and they embark on a “ticket to paradise.”
Copies: 1 (DVD+R); Length: 88 minutes
Title: WHICH WAY HOME
Description: A heart-wrenching exploration of a lesser-known dimension of Central American migration to the United States. Every year tens of thousands of unaccompanied children, attempt to migrate through Mexico to the United States. Some as young as nine years old, these children ride atop the roofs of Mexican freight trains in hopes of getting to the United States. This film centers on the experiences of two teenagers from Honduras, Kevin and Fito, following them as they make their way north. The film explores their experiences undertaking a journey that is harrowing even for the most resourceful of adults. Interviews with migrant children,immigration officials, and parents back home reveal the myriad dangers these children face and their determination to brave these dangers in hopes of obtaining a better life.
Subject: Migration/Immigration, Latinos/Chicanos, Social Issues
Type: Documentary
Year: 2009
Director: Rebecca Cammisa
Country: Central America/Mexico/United States
Film ID: 700
Comments:
Created: 5/13/2010
Copy: 1 Format: DVD-R Language: English and Spanish Subtitles: English Length: 90 minutes Copy ID: 1362 Comments: Source: Price: 0 Acquired: 4/7/2011
Title: SOBADA
Description: Sobada is a documentary about the techniques used by midwives in Mexico in order to help a woman during her pregnancy. The specific technique discussed in the video is called sobada which is a type of abdominal massage. This technique is used by the indigenous midwives in order to make the process of birth easier.
Subject: Social Issues, Social Life and Customs
Type: Documentary
Year: 2007
Director: Erica Barbiani
Country: Mexico
Film ID: 779
Comments:
Created: 4/9/2012
Copy: 1 Format: DVD-R Language: Spanish Subtitles: None Length: 35 Minutes Copy ID: 1406 Comments: Source: Price: 0
Title: SIN DEJAR HUELLA (WITHOUT A TRACE)
Description: Sin Dejar Huella uses drama and comedy in equal measure to tell the story of two women–one Spanish and the other Mexican–fleeing from their respective pasts. Ana, a con artist, and Aurelia, a young mother escaping from her drug-dealing husband, meet on the road by chance. Protecting one another from the dangers that pursue them, they travel from northern Mexico to Chiapas. Along the way they gradually learn the truth about one another.
Subject: Social Issues, Drama, Comedy, Travel
Type: Feature Film
Year: 2000
Director: María Novaro
Country: Mexico
Film ID: 744
Comments:
Created: 4/11/2011
Copy: 1 Format: DVD-R Language: Spanish Subtitles: English Length: 109 minutes Copy ID: 1363 Comments: Source: Film festival Price: 0 Acquired: 4/11/2011
Title: ORFEU
Description: The legend of Orpheus and Eurydice is retold against the madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. The story is enhanced by brilliant performances, thrilling music, and magnificent color photography.
Type: Feature Film
Year: 1999
Director: Carlos Diegues
Country: Brazil
Film ID: 10
Comments:
Created:
Copy: 1 Format: DVD-R Language: Portuguese Subtitles: English Length: 112 minutes Copy ID: 1032 Comments: Source: Price: 0 Acquired: 9/9/9999
“Fuera de Liga,” a documentary that has circulated the Havana streets, raises the problems that exist in Cuban baseball, those hidden behind the passions that are awoken by the stadiums of Cuba’s national sport. Directed by Ian Padrón and produced by ICAIC, this 68 minute film was never released into theaters. It is presented as a documentary about the baseball team the “Industriales,” an emblem of Cuban baseball, which has won a record 10 national series. The difficult conditions of life for the players as well as many other themes are approached in this film. It also talks about those athletes that left Cuba play professional baseball elsewhere.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 68 Minutes
Description: This documentary combines social commentary with surrealism to explore the Cuban soul. The filmmakers take the viewer on a trip through the heart of twenty-first-century Cuba, making stops in Pinar del Río, los Acuáticos, Matanzas, Cienfuegos, and Guaraabuya. In each stopping place, local lore and characters help present an overall portrait of Cuban history, society, and culture.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 56 minutes
Description: A documentary about the Brazilian sex trade, Cinderelas, Lobos, e Principe Encantado explores how poor Brazilian women, mostly black, are lured by middle-aged European men into traveling to Europe with them. European, American, or Canadian men feel that European, American, or Canadian women are too cold and unsensible while the Brazilian women look for the security and freedom that Brazilian men cannot provide. The documentary interviews Brazilian women who were previously sex workers and have now moved to Europe with white men.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 106 Minutes
Description: Chigualeros is a documentary about one of the most famous orchestras in Ecuador. Chigualeros, founded almost three decades agos , fuses different sounds like son, marimba, guaracha, currulao, bolero, and the chigualo. Like many parts of Latin America, Ecuador has an African history that is evoked through the mix of sounds in the Chigualeros.The documentary presents the lives of the members of the group while also exploring the deforestation of the tropical forests of the region.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 80 minutes
Description: “Different skin tones, individual and collective stories. This is the content of the documentary, ‘The Americas Have Color: Afro-Descendants in 21st-Century Censuses.’ This documentary reconstructs the African Diaspora’s ties to the Americas and reveals the censuses’ strategic role for advancing the rights of Afro-descendants in Latin America. The documentary was conceived by the 2010 Census Afro-descendant Group, produced by TV Brasil International, and funded by UNIFEM Brazil and Southern Cone, through its Regional Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Poverty Program.” Part of 4-DVD collection, “Coletânea Gênero, Raça e Etnia.”
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 29 minutes
Description: “Looking For You, Havana” is a documentary that follows a group of undocumented Cubans from the eastern province of Oriente looking for a better life in Havana. Without proper documents allowing them to legally live there, they often set up a home in areas close to the city, building with whatever they can get their hands on–wood, cardboard, sheet metal. These shantytowns, called fanguitos, are similar to Brazil’s favelas. Quite often lacking running water and electricity, without proper papers residents are not entitled to medical care or education and, if caught, are deported back to their province
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 30 minutes
Description: “The Situation of Afro-descendant Women in Latin America” examines the correlation between race and poverty across the Americas with particular focus on the experiences of Latin American women. This UNIFEM-produced documentary features interviews with experts and activists from Brazil, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia, all of whom highlight discrimination against women of color throughout the region. Part of 4-DVD collection, “Coletânea Gênero, Raça e Etnia.”
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 15 minutes
Description: Terras (“Lands”) is a documentary about the border of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, located in the heart of the Amazon. On this triple frontier the twin towns of Leticia (Colombia) and Tabatinga (Brazil) form an urban island surrounded by forest. It is a region marked by a constant flow of people from diverse origins, where ancestral and contemporary cultures live side-by-side. Through photography and sound, Terras explores the concept of frontier beyond the territorial demarcations that divide nations. Immersing itself in the daily lives of the towns and their inhabitants, this documentary uses a poetic and reflective approach to reflect on the relationship and contact between different nationalities, ethnicities, and cultures.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 74 minutes
Description: This documentary examines a Colombian musical tradition that has emerged to become an internationally popular music genre. Its rural sentiment, straightforward message, and danceable rhythms now appeal to millions of fans around the world. In Colombia’s northern Magdalena Valley, vallenato or “valley music” is the rage and the accordion is king. The region is a place where small children learn to play the accordion at their father’s knee while hundreds of professional practitioners, sometimes several generations of accordeoneros in the same family, perform dazzling feats of musical prowess at social events and duel for bragging rights at annual festivals. The film features an exclusive interview with pop star Carlos Vives and behind-the-scenes footage of the legendary annual Vallenato Festival.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 75 minutes
Description: Eugenia Ramírez, a young dentist, returns home from a congress, only to find that her apartment has been ransacked. Furious, she tries to recover her childhood photo album at any cost, demanding that justice be done. However, she is unaware that this interferes with the interests of a gang of delinquents who turn her into the pursued instead of the pursuer.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 101 Minutes
Description: A documentary about the effects of IMF and World Bank policies on the economy and society of Nicaragua, and the efforts to counteract the negative results of such policies through cooperative and community development efforts. Based primarily on oral interviews with representatives from development agencies.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 50 minutes
Description: Enchanting, playful, and outrageous, this film presents two unsuccessful people who each adopt fictional personae in order to escape the doldrums of their daily lives. It is a web of adorable little lies told to brighten their otherwise gray existence creating a complicated and ambivalent love story.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 100 minutes
Description: This film by Francis Negrón and Peter Biella examines the impact of AIDS within Hispanic-American communities, focusing on the specific economic, social and cultural factors which influence perception of the AIDS crisis.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 29 minutes
Description: Death in the Aymara culture is an experience in which the mourners, the community, the souls participate together. Age-old rituals, mixed with Catholic symbols assimilated by the people, frame the story of Andres and his young daughter Leonora. Upon drowning in Lake Titikaka, they must find their way to Korimarca (the Aymara Heaven) with help from the members of the community to which they belonged.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 29 minutes
Description: Ordinary Nicaraguans narrate the story of 22 turbulent years (1979-2001) in their nation’s history, from the triumph of the Sandinistas, to the day they were voted out of office in 1990, to the tumultuous years since. This film, beautifully shot among the wreckage of Nicaragua’s disastrous war, the abandoned properties of its old landholders, and the urban slums of Managua, presents the story of Nicaragua from a variety of perspectives.
Copies: 1
Length: 51 minutes
Description: A moving story about growing up in the pampas, based on the famous autobiographical novel of the same title. Through his deep friendship with an old "gaucho," a boy coming of age becomes fascinated with nature and the mysteries of the human soul.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 91 minutes
Description: A documentary about the efforts to bring alpacas, indigenous animals of the Andes who were sacred in Inca culture, to a community in Northern Peru. Populations of alpacas were devastated during the Spanish conquest. The film depicts this cooperative project, which was initiated in the small Andean community and sponsored by the Interamerican Foundation.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 28 minutes
Description: An allegory about an idealistic ten-year-old peasant who dreams of flying like a condor. He eventually learns to fly when he joins guerrillas fighting in an imaginary Central American country.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 90 minutes
Description: “Continent on the Move” This program examines the causes and effects of one of the most important forces transforming the Americas: the migration of vast numbers of people within the region. The program is set in Mexico, where migration has moved people across borders, and from rural villages to congested cities.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 60 minutes
Description: “Fire in the Mind” This program looks at revolutionaries in the region today, with a special emphasis on the former guerrilla fighters in El Salvador and the current movement in Peru, and links these movements to the revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 60 minutes
Description: A collection of mostly hand drawn animation, this film brings to reality a life of toling for the cartoonist. Includes: Why Cybraceros?, Dia de la Independencia, Sign of the Times, Latinos on TV, Mysterious, and Apparitions on Tortillas
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 60 minutes
Description: An informative and sensitive documentary that tells the story of Mayan women activists and their courageous fight for indigenous rights in Guatemala. Featuring several outstanding women that are playing an important role in this struggle, including 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 50 minutes
Description: Two decades after the devastating region-wide political violence of the 1970s and 1980s, Central America now confronts other forms of violence that have proven to be considerably destructive in their own right. These forms include organized crime, gangs, poverty and marginality, and are exacerbated by the firearms that entered the region during the years of civil war. Las Armas de la Violencia explores the dimensions, effects, costs (both human and economic,) of these new forms of violence and the responses of Central American societies to their emergence.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 60 minutes
Description: Part I is a documentary dealing with the art of the Mexican revolution as a political movement and a revolution in art. Text by Octavio Paz. Part II examines these monumental creations not only for their great aesthetic value, but also as an essential and fascinating part of Mexico’s history. The murals are examples of the marriage of art and political thought. Includes works by Rivera and Siqueiros. Part III is an insight into the elements of the life experiences of Tamayo, a Zapotecan Indian and a famous Mexican painter.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 60 minutes; 30 minutes; 28 minutes
Description: Espinoza is a shy taxidermist who secretly dreams of executing the perfect robbery. On his first ever hunting trip, in the calm of the Patagonian forest, his dreams become reality when he accidentally kills a man who turns out to be a real criminal and inherits his scheme: the heist of an armored van carrying casino profits. Caught up in a world of complex new rules and frightening violence, Espinoza’s lack of experience puts him in real danger. And he has another, more dangerous liability: he is an epileptic. Before each seizure he is visited by the ”aura”: a paradoxical moment of confusion and enlightenment where the past and future seem to blend. Is a world of violence what he really wants and can he actually survive? Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 129 minutes
Description: The lively João Grilo and the sly Chicó are poor guys living in the hinterland who cheat a bunch of people in a small Northeast Brazil town. But when they die, they have to be judged by Christ, the Devil and the Virgin Mary, before they are admitted to paradise.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 104 minutes
Description: The inhospitable backlands, or sertão, of northeastern Brazil was home to a fearsome group of social bandits – the cangaceiros. Among the most infamous of these outlaws, known by their hats covered with mystic talismans, was the bespectacled Lampião whose depredations became legend in the 1930s. The film portrays the filmmaker and photographer Benjamin Abrahão, a Lebanese immigrant, who captured the elusive bandits with his camera.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 93 minutes
Description: Adaptation of a story by the Venezuelan writer Guillermo Meneses. A sharp portrait of the lives of blacks, mulattoes and zambos in an urban Venezuelan scenery narrated through the story of a black prostitute in love with a sailor.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 96 minutes
Description: The second in a trilogy, Barrio Cuba tells a trio of stories, all dealing with commonplace Cuban social struggles. Solás and his superior cast pay tribute to the authentic slums of the Havana suburbs, stripping away the sheen of a world previously glamorized by touristy stereotypes.
Copies: 3 (DVD)
Length: 106 minutes
Description: An impressionistic journey through the music of Cuba, Spain and Mexico from pre-Columbian times to the present, on the occasion of the Fifth Centenary of the Conquest.
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS)
Length: 111 minutes
Description: Episodic look at the life of Cuban poet and novelist, Reynaldo Arenas (1943-1990), from his childhood in Oriente province to his death in New York City. By 1964, he is in Havana where his writing and homosexuality get him into trouble: he spends two years in prison, writing letters for other inmates and smuggling out a novel. He befriends Lázaro Gomes Garriles, with whom he lives stateless and in poverty in Manhattan after leaving Cuba. When asked why he writes, he replies cheerfully, “Revenge.”
Copies: 2 (DVD)
Length: 133 minutes
Description: A period musical, based on the novel The Song of Rachel by Miguel Barnet, the film concerns a young woman who uses everyone to attain her dream of being a singer at the Alhambra, Cuba’s top burlesque theatre in the 1920’s.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 108 minutes
Description: A profile of the first black woman ever to be elected city councilor and member of the Brazilian Parliament from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Bene, as she prefers to be called, has lived her entire life in the favelas and worked for twenty-five years as a domestic servant before beginning her public life in 1982, when she won a post as city councilor and was elected a federal MP in 1986. She now devotes her efforts to fighting the racism and discrimination faced by Rio’s slum dwellers, and comments from community leaders and residents show the love and respect she has earned.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 29 minutes
Description: You are invited to the wedding of Elizabeth and Artemio in Nuevo León, Mexico. The video introduces a young couple whose lives and community have roots in Mexico while they encounter the challenges of migrant life in the United States.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 53 minutes
Description: The acclaimed performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña directs himself in this video focusing on issues of cross-culturalism along the U.S.-Mexico border. In his performance he switches in and out of various characters reflecting different aspects of border culture.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 50 minutes
Description: Nearly 2000 maquiladoras have been built in Mexico by companies from the US, Asia and Europe. As a result, the border has become a 2000 mile-long open sewer, a vast toxic waste dump. Filmed in three border regions, (Matamoros and Brownsville; Tijuana and San Diego; Ciudad Juarez and El Paso), Borderline Cases reveals the complexity and magnitude of the clean-up and gives a sense of energy and imagination found in the diverse mix of people of both countries who are re-thinking traditional notions of borders as they engage in the search for solutions.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 65 minutes
Description: This creative film is shot from the perspective of a German shepherd on the streets of Havana. It is a comic portrayal of the idiosyncrasies, foibles, and hypocrisy of the human species, as seen from the obviously superior point of view of a dog. Interspersed interviews highlight peoples strange and excessive behavior toward their pets.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 22 minutes
Description: This film highlights some of Brazil’s most impressive features. From economics and industry to geography and culture, this documentary serves as an informative introduction to a country unlike any other. It focuses on major cities like Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazilia and Salvador da Bahia, while also placing emphasis on the country’s rural culture and diversity.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Description: Oscar Chavez, a great Mexican singer and actor is the leading actor of this story about the life of Pedro Gonzalez, the host of a radio show in 1930s Los Angeles. His life was filled with romance and music until he challenged a powerful and corrupt political system.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 100 minutes
Description: El Bulto is a young photographer who is beaten and loses consciousness during a 1971 student protest. He wakes up twenty years later to find a new and different world of computers, new illnesses, and the absence of Communism. His family has also changed, and he is no longer 20 years old. Trying to make up lost time, he learns that his long sleep may have been for the best.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 114 minutes
Description: Freely adopted from the book Naufragios by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (written in 1542). The film portrays the saga of the adventures of a group of Spanish soldiers in Mexico. Their leader, Cabeza de Vaca, is considered to be one of the first Spaniards to come to some appreciation of the native Indians.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 112 minutes
Description: An introspective look at young Cuban-Americans, the now-adult children of the first wave of Cuban exiles that came to the U.S. This documentary focuses on the fusion of traditional, old world values of yesteryear and modern, American culture, as the young Cuban-Americans comment on their experiences growing up bi-culturally.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 85 minutes
Description: Based on a true story from the 1800s, the film relates the tragic story of two young lovers: Camila, from a wealthy traditional family, and a young priest. They both defy family, church, and state in order to pursue their happiness. This is Maria Luisa Bemberg’s most acclaimed film, earning an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 108 minutes
Description: Avant-garde performance art / plays performed by the Buendía theatre group in 1992
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 106 minutes
Description: Based on the real life experiences of Doctor Drauzio Varella as a social worker inside the Carandiru state penitentiary in Sao Paulo, the largest correctional facility in Brazil. Hundreds of prisoners live in degrading conditions while an elite group of prisoners rule the actual prison based on their own codes and laws. This rule ends in bloodshed in October 1992 when 300 policemen storm the facility and kill 111 unarmed inmates.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 145 minutes
Description: A discussion of the 1933 text Casa Grande & Senzala(Masters and Slaves) by Brazilian anthropologist and historian, Gilberto Freyre, this documentary consists of four 1-hour segments. The camera follows Prof. Edson Nery, friend and biographer of Freyre, on an exploration of Brazils colonial past that blurs the lines between history, art, and the social sciences. In addition to explaining the circumstances of colonization it also examines the darker, sensual side of Brazils past in an attempt to define what the country is today.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Length: 120 minutes
Description: This film investigates the origins and development of the international legal prosecution of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. It explores how a small group of people in Madrid laid the groundwork for his arrest. After Pinochets arrest by Scotland Yard, the film follows the workings of the British legal system that ensued. The film also movingly incorporates the stories of many Chileans who traveled to Madrid to testify, including relatives of the disappeared and others who survived horrifying torture in secret prisons. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 109 minutes
Description: This film centers around a young and eccentric radio show host who has a successful program on the air. His anonymous callers tell their stories of love, entanglements, misunderstandings and passionate affairs.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description: Based on Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s memoir Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, this film constitutes part 1 of the two part series directed by Steven Soderbergh on the life of this iconic hero of the Cuban revolution. While focusing on Guevara’s role in the guerrilla campaign that begins in the Sierra Maestra and ultimately ousts Fulgencio Batista from power, the movie also splices in scenes depicting Guevara’s visit to the United Nations and audio re-creation of an interview that presents some of Guevara’s political philosophies and thoughts on being a revolutionary. The film portrays the personal dynamics of his relationship with Fidel Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, and other anti-Batista activists during the war, Guevara’s leadership style as reflected in his efforts to maintain discipline in the rebel army, and the final military campaign that culminates in the capture of the city of Santa Clara and the flight of Batista from the country.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 135 minutes
Description: Part two of Stephen Soderbergh’s chronicle of the revolutionary activities of Ernesto “Che” Guevara examines Guevara’s attempts to start a revolutionary guerrilla movement in the jungles of Bolivia. Beginning with his arrival in Bolivia under a false identity, the film traces the factors which result in ultimate failure, as well Guevara’s untimely demise. Efforts to attract the support of Bolivian peasantry ultimately fail as Che’s band is unable to convince the peasants that supporting them is in their best interests. The insurgency effort becomes more and more desperate as the Bolivian military, with the support of the United States, steadily gains the upper hand in its attempts to quell the rebellion.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 136 minutes
Description: On October 9, 1967, Che Guevara was executed by the Bolivian army, aided by the CIA. Ches diary, a detailed, personal account of his futile 11-month attempt to spark a revolution in Bolivia, is the basis of this intimate filmed portrait.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 94 minutes
Description: Made by Sylvia Morales. Chicana traces the history of Chicana and Mexican women from pre-Columbian times to the present. It covers women’s role in Aztec society, their participation in the 1810 struggle for Mexican independence, their involvement in the US labor strikes in 1872, their contributions to the 1910 Mexican revolution and their leadership in contemporary civil rights causes. A classic film by a leading Latina filmmaker.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 23 minutes
Description: Chile, Obstinate Memory visits with Chileans who experienced Augusto Pinochets coup first-hand. Survivors reminisce as they watch Patricio Guzmáns film The Battle of Chile, recognizing lost comrades and recalling their courage, gaiety, and love of life. Those who were not killed during the coup itself were crowded into the National Stadium in Santiago, where many were tortured, disappeared, and never seen again. Survivors talk about the terror that characterized the Pinochet regime until the dictator was finally obliged to relinquish power.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 58 minutes
Description: This film looks at the Christmas traditions of Mexico, which feature influences from both Spanish and Native American backgrounds. Intended primarily for younger audiences, with highlights of the celebrations. Produced by the Educational Video Network
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 25 minutes
Description: Deco and Naldinho are best friends in a constant struggle to earn an honest living in the gritty world of Salvador de Bahias Lower City. When a beautiful prostitute named Karina asks to hitch a ride, the twosome quickly becomes a threesome. To survive life in the Lower City, the trio must learn to accept each other as lovers, friends and enemies. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 98 minutes
Description: In the midst of the streets of the world’s most notorious slum, Rio de Janeiro’s “City of God,” a frail and scared young boy will grow up to discover that he can view the harsh realities of his surroundings with a different eye: the eye of an artist. In the face of impossible odds, his brave ambition to become a professional photographer becomes a window into his world and ultimately his way out. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 130 minutes
Description: In 1942, Johann, a lonely German, travels through the Northeast of Brazil in his truck selling aspirins in small villages, using advertisement movies to promote the medicine. He meets and befriends a drifter but later must make a life changing decision between homeland and friends.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 99 minutes
Description: Four fictional stories set in New York City, but common to many other places United States or the world. Filmed in black and white, the program depicts Latin American immigrants living in New York: day laborers paid to gather brick from an abandoned lot struggle to save one crushed when a wall collapses; a young man from Mexico meets a girl from his home village at a quinceañera, then loses her in the maze of a housing project; a homeless puppeteer dreams of a better life for his daughter, but cannot enroll her in school; a sweatshop seamstress needs money for her daughter’s medical treatment, but her employer has not paid her in more than a month. Most of the actors are nonprofessionals and are themselves struggling immigrants, bringing understanding and realism to the film Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 84 minutes
Description: German colonizers dominated many coffee estates in Guatemala during the early twentieth century. This documentary takes us through the old coffee baron’s plantations, and examines a new generation of entrepreneurs in key posts within the government behind anonymous company names. Maya peoples continue to contest the concentration of land, and military and police abuse. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 139 minutes
Description: An intimate portrait of the historic electoral campaign that made Evo Morales the first indigenous president of Bolivia. Through direct personal access to Morales, the filmmakers document his interactions with the union of Coca growers who formed his initial political base, the day-to-day management of the campaign, and attempts to educate voters about the electoral process. The film also explores connections between Morales and other leaders of the New Left in Latin America, as well as the conflicting views about his candidacy among more affluent Bolivians. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 94 minutes
Description: This video is part of a series that seeks to provide developmental and educational materials that engage the cultural heritage of Latin America. Los Colores de Rufino teaches about colors while exploring the work and words of Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo as well as the poetry of Alfonso Reyes and Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 37 minutes
Description: This documentary features interviews with indigenous activists from North, South, and Central America who gathered at the First Contintental Conference of Indigenous Peoples in July of 1990. Native people speak about the impact on their cultures of the Columbus legacy, contemporary struggles over land and human rights, the importance of reviving spiritual traditions, and the need to alert the world to environmental crises.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 24 minutes
Description: In the late 1990s and early 2000s the internal conflict in Columbia between the government, military groups and armed forces displaced many communities, mainly made up of peasant farmers. These farmers were forced to leave their homes. This documentary follows the stories and lives of some of the people from San Francisco de Asis. It lets us into their personal thoughts and opinions on the conflict, war, and their way of life. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 54 minutes
Description: Nena, Rosa and Ludmilla are three Cuban sisters that arrive in Madrid looking for a better life than the one they left behind in Havana. Their aunt, Maria, has lived in Spain for many years and has a business in which she intents to exploit her nieces for a roof to live in. A whole world of conflicts, deceits and comical situations face them, soon realizing that Madrid is not the paradise they intended to find.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 100 minutes
Description: This film documents the traveling performance of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco, in which they exhibit themselves as caged Amerindians from an imaginary island, providing a vivid and provocative interpretation of cultural encounters.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 30 minutes
Description: This documentary tells the story of how, after centuries of inaccessibility, the Mayan hieroglyphics were finally decoded by archaeologists. Through many discoveries by people of all ages, including Michael Coe and David Stuart, the Mayan Civilization is brought to life during this fascinating account of how the Mayan “code” was cracked, and the ways in which this newly available script has reshaped our understanding of Mayan civilization.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 54 minutes
Description: In 1995, the U.S. Border Patrol instituted Operation Gatekeeper, which has caused the death of about 1800 migrants since its implementation. CROSSES documents the efforts of artists and activists to bring the disastrous effects of Operation Gatekeeper to the conscience of the people of both the U.S. and Mexico, and to pressure the governments of both countries. By representing every death with a cross bearing the name of the victim, mounted directly on the border wall, they keep the issues alive. Crosses are still visible today. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 18 minutes
Description: One of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet. An inside look at the infamous $27 billion "Amazon Chernobyl" case, CRUDE is a real-life high stakes legal drama set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media, multinational corporate power, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. Presenting a complex situation from multiple viewpoints, the film examines a complicated situation from several angles while bringing a story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 104 minutes
Description: A fast paced weaving of sound bites and interviews that lets young Cubans speak and argue for themselves. What they have to say or sing or rap suggests that everyone born after the revolution has an opinion. Directors/Producers: Gail Dolgin, Vicente Franco. USA (the filmmakers consulted with many Cubans, and filming is entirely in Cuba, but production was done in San Francisco). Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 60 minutes
Description: This program gathers together the most representative of exiled Cuban filmmakers, who recount their personal experiences of having to abandon their work and start a new life away from their country, culture and natural environment. The program features clips of their film and photographs as it takes viewers on a journey from Cuba in the late 1950s to the lives of the filmmakers today. Although Castro encouraged the development of a state sponsored cinema in Cuba, opening doors for many talented filmmakers, his policies towards intellectuals led many of these same filmmakers to abandon the island, leaving behind a broken image, an interrupted flow of creativity which some were able to find again abroad but others were not. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 46 minutes
Description: This short film explores the work of several Cuban artists who collaborate with Vígia Press, a unique publishing house in Matanzas which makes beautifully crafted books by hand. The interviewed artists discuss their imaginative modes of contemplating what constitutes a book or text, and the ways in which they blur the boundaries between artistic and literary expression. This film was produced in conjunction with the exhibit Cuban Artists’ Books and Prints, an exhibit organized at Wake Forest University that featured 120 pieces of Cuban art, including several of the handmade books mentioned in the film. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 18 minutes
Description: This is a collection of five short experimental videos made by Cuban directors. Here is a brief description of each film: DeMoler (12 min) is a short documentary directed by Angel González about a small sugar mill and its meaning to its workers; Horizontes (3 min) is a silent animated film directed by Yemelí Cruz Revero and Adanoe Lima Cruz; 25 KM (19 min) is a film directed by Jeffery Puento that follows the journey of two Cuban women on their way to church; Freddy o el Sueño de Noel (7 min) is an experimental film directed by Waldo Ramirez that shows short clips of men fishing; Todo Por Ella (20 min), directed by Pavel Giroud, tells the story of a 19 year old male who is caught up in the world of sex, drugs, and debts. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 62 minutes
Description: This documentary traces the tangled paths and multifaceted identity of a black Cuban family in the Bronx. Both working-class and professional, black and Latino, foreign and native, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking, the family is shown in the constant process of negotiating its identity. On their arrival in Miami, the family immediately encountered racial segregation, and they were forced to choose their identity: Are you black or Spanish? The film explores the various experiences that each family member had in dealing with the realities of life as black Cuban-Americans in the Bronx. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 56 minutes
Description: An exploration of the experience of Cubans living in the United States, focusing especially on the nature of the community since 1959. The film avoids explicit discussions of politics and instead focuses on the maintenance of community, culture and identity among Cubans now living in the United Staes. Through interviews with numerous celebrities, the film explores the experience of leaving Cuba and subsequent exile in the United States, that challenges of building lives as newly arrived immigrants in the United States, and the cultural forms that served as vehicles for the preservation of Cuban identity. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description: This very first three-color, live action film production is a comic short about a volatile tempered cantina girl trying to regain the love of a fellow dancer. The piece has lots of dancing and music, marking the debut of Technicolor. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 21 minutes
Description: In this lively road picture, three friends are contracted by a notorious gangster to create a carved statue depicting the Virgin Mary for a religious celebration in Bolivia. Domingo is the one commissioned to carve the life-size figure. After carving it, Joaquin, a gambler manages to procure a truck to transport it. They are also joined by Domingo’s only friend Pepelucho. Loading the statue upright in the truck they set off on an incredible adventure. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 86 minutes
Description: To call attention to the absence of their loved ones, "disappeared" during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Chilean women perform the cueca, Chile’s national dance of passion and courtship, poignantly and without partners. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 100 minutes
Description: Experience the ancestral rituals of the Day of the Dead as it takes place in the mystic atmosphere of Jantzio. Watch as the people prepare themselves to receive their dead relatives as they clean and decorate graves and they set beautiful tables or altars in which they place offerings of food, liquor, cigarettes and flowers for the enjoyment of the visiting dead. In the evening the people go to the cemetery to bid farewell to the dead using thousands of candles to guide them on their long journey back. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 21 minutes
Description: “A Day Without a Mexican” is a “mocumentary” – a real documentary about a false event! California is shocked. One third of its population has disappeared and they are all Hispanics. Reporters take to the streets to capture the immediate effects of the crisis: “The Mexicans disappeared? That’s great!” Have you been to the store…$6 for a head of lettuce, $8 for a pound of tomatoes.” The film mixes facts and fiction with a touch of humor. Fact and fiction quickly begin to look alike, calling into question the idea of “objectivity” and “documentary as the truth.” Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 30 minutes
Description: Marcello Mastroianni stars in this film by the late Maria Luisa Bemberg, one of Latin America’s greatest directors. Mastroianni plays Ludovico, a sophisticated world traveler who retires to a small town and is drawn to the most intelligent woman in the village, a dwarf who has been sheltered by her overprotective mother. A charming fable about love and the intrusion of society. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 102 minutes
Description: This documentary tells the remarkable story of a rebel people – the Mascogos, known in the United States as the Black Seminoles. This exceptional community is descended from escaped slaves who made common cause with the Seminole Indians of Florida. The exceptional Mascogo/Black Seminole culture combines African-American spirituals, Indian fry-bread, and Tex-Mex cowboy culture. Filmed on both sides of the border, this video documents the complex history of people of African descent caught between national boundaries, and the efforts of their descendants to maintain their culture. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 50 minutes
Description: A powerful psychological thriller about one woman’s struggle to heal from the effects of torture. Fifteen years after being tortured and imprisoned by a sadistic doctor, Paulina Escobar, played by Sigourney Weaver, faces a man who may have been her torturer. This film reflects the realities of political repression that occurred in Chile during the Pinochet regime. A Roman Polanski film based on the play by Ariel Dorfman. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 103 minutes
Description:
Through a poetic combination of words and paintings, Dedos De Luna tells the story of Toño and his grandfather, Don Gregorio. They enjoy making masks together, until Don Gregorio dies after making his last mask. Toño must come to terms with the death and decide whether to carry on the tradition of mask making. This is an instructional video that is intended to be paired with the rest of the Dedos De Luna unit.
Description: This richly allegorical film, set amid bandits and prophets in arid Northeastern Brazil of the early twentieth century, is a classic work of cinema novo by one of Brazil’s premier directors, Gláuber Rocha. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 120 minutes
Description: Diana is a ‘Devoradora,’ a man-eater. Men who fall in love with her get chewed up and spit out without any regard for their feelings. Diana an ambitious and frivolous woman, committed a crime and tried to blame some one else for the murder, and succeeds in some way, but she never thought her punishment would be just as big. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 117 minutes
Description: When Lourdes Portillo receives a phone call informing her that her uncle was found dead she returns to Mexico. Her investigation of the circumstances of her uncle’s death takes us deep into the land of Northern Mexico, inside the life of her family and her community, to a place between reality and fiction. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 82 minutes
Description: The Motorcycle Diaries is an adaptation of a journal written by Ernesto Che Guevara when he was 23 years old. He and his friend, Alberto Granado are typical college students who, seeking fun and adventure before graduation, decide to travel across Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Peru in order to do their medical residency at a leper colony. The two best friends start off with the same goals and aspirations, but by the time the film is over, it’s clear what each man’s destiny has become. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 128 minutes
Description: A provocative artistic film about a Cuban woman, Antoñica, possessed by a deity, or orisha. Set in Pinar del Río in 1936, first the local clergy and doctors conspire to remove her and her followers. A politician comes to their defense to project himself into power, only to call in the army later. Please note that this film is not subtitled. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 109 minutes
Description: Five stories about the contradictions and ironies of human conduct, combining satire, tragi-comedy and unexpected conclusions. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 126 minutes
Description: Despite Americas 30-year war on drugs, the use of heroin, cocaine, and marijuana remains essentially unchanged. This two-part documentary presents a television history of Americas war on drugs from both sides of the battlefield. The first episode examines the impact of crack cocaine on our city streets and our criminal justice system. The report also investigates Mexicos role in supplying drugs for American demand. The second episode recounts the origins of the drug campaign, from the Nixon administrations drug control efforts to the rapid rise and fall of the Colombian drug cartels. PBS documentary from Frontline. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 120 minutes
Description: Despite Americas 30-year war on drugs, the use of heroin, cocaine, and marijuana remains essentially unchanged. This two-part documentary presents a television history of Americas war on drugs from both sides of the battlefield. The first episode examines the impact of crack cocaine on our city streets and our criminal justice system. The report also investigates Mexicos role in supplying drugs for American demand. The second episode recounts the origins of the drug campaign, from the Nixon administrations drug control efforts to the rapid rise and fall of the Colombian drug cartels. PBS documentary from Frontline. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 120 minutes
Description: Documentary tribute to the late Linda Schele, among the leading scholars of Maya civilization, who in January 1998 gave a long, filmed interview in which she talks freely and frankly in her own inimitable style about her life, work, and philosophy. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 50 minutes
Description: The psychological study of a man who pursues and marries a young woman only to become obsessed with insane jealously over her supposed infidelity. As in other Buñuel films, beneath the calm and predictable world presented is the surreal logic of a dream which becomes a nightmare. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 88 minutes
Description: El Prisonero 13 (Prisoner 13) is part of the trilogy of films made by Fernando Fuentes concerning the Mexican Revolution. The film centers on the drunkard Colonel Carrasco, whose wife Marta leaves him taking his young son. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 74 minutes
Description: A portrait of a country under assault from Washington and the World Bank. This documentary shows the impact of structural adjustment, privatization and the global sweatshop economy on the people of El Salvador. It also explores the posible alternatives through interviews with activists in the women’s movement, labor leaders and the FMLN. Historical footage takes you from the start of the civil war in 1980 to the economic war of the ’90s, including new and inspiring images of strikers inside a Free Trade Zone.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 30 minutes
Description: This film documents the womens movement in Ecuador and womens increased importance in the community and the economy in which they live. This film explores how womens roles have increased by forming organizations and by obtaining jobs previously only open to men such as teaching and medicine.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 20 minutes
Description: Elpidio Valdés is an animated film which deals with the risky mission of bringing from Tampa, Florida, a shipment of arms for the freedom fighters of the Ejército Libertador. With Captain María Silva, his horse Palmiche, and his compatriots of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano, they confront their enemies, the Spanish colonialists and the Yankees.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 80 minutes
Description: This powerful and personal documentary tells the story of Elvia Alvarado, a peasant woman who has been struggling for years to enforce an agrarian reform law that has been in the books since 1972. The video provides historical background about the need for agrarian reform in Honduras, explaining the dependence on export crops, the powerful military, and control by U. S. aid. It also gives a perspective on other social issues in the country. Copies: 1 Length: 27 minutes
Description: In Mexico City, a second layer is being built atop the Periférico freeway, which inscribes a massive circle on the metropolis. Despite the project’s enormity, the workers who are building the freeway are barely noticed by drivers who roll by endlessly. Rulfo’s film places us among these workers. The film chronicles long days of arduous work, risk taking, joking, swearing, and philosophizing.
Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 80 minutes
Description: The story of five women’s lives interwoven with festivities, music, poetry, and art in the historically matrifocal Zapotec region of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 15 minutes
Description: Based on a short story by Gabriel García Márquez. A teenage girl is exploited as a sexual slave by her greedy grandmother. An erotic black comedy laden with sexual fantasy, bawdy humor and sly political allegory. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 103 minutes
Description: There are over 800,000 students enrolled in migrant education programs in the United States and, of those, only 45-50% ever finish high school. “Escuela”, the sequel to Hannah Weyer’s critically acclaimed documentary “La Boda”, personalizes these glaring statistics through the honest portrait of a teenage Mexican-American farm worker, Liliana Luis. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 52 minutes
Description: After the coup detat that occurred on September 11, 1973, the Chilean government initiated an atrocious pursuit against former allies of the overthrown Socialist President, Salvador Allende. A series of house raids were conducted and thousands of people were arrested. This documentary tells how more than 12,000 prisoners were confined, tortured and some were killed at the National Stadium—making it the largest concentration camp in Chile. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description: Compilation of short animated films not meant for younger audience because of their political propaganda upholding socialist ideals. These films were produced for the Cuban government to educate people on the values of the Revolution and/or to educate on certain governmental programs such as agricultural reform. Directors include Jesus de Armas, Harry Reade, Luis Rogelio Rodriguez, Hernan Henriquez, Juan Padrón, Mario Rivas, Tulio Raggi, Rayner Valdés Padrón, Tony Nodarse, Nelson Serrano, Jose E. Garcia, Isis Chaviano, and Johanhn Ramírez. Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 85 minutes
Description: A film biography about Evita Perón, the work seeks to portray the political acumen and skill of a consummate politician–"the power behind the throne"–of the populist Argentine, Juan Perón. The film represents an Argentine perspective grounded in history rather than treatments of Evita such as Andrew Lloyd Weber musical and Madonna versions. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 114 minutes
Description: Two of Cubas leading hip-hop groups, Obsesion and Doble Filo, have formed the collective La Fabri_K to showcase their art. This film follows the artists from their homes in Havana through their eye-opening concert tour in the United States, exploring the conflicts they confront along the way. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 62
Description: Based on a fragment from his novel Love in the Time of Cholera, this film was conceived and co-written by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. It tells the story of Orestes, a wealthy factory owner who falls madly in love with a married pigeon breeder. Part of the film series Amores Difíciles. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 73 minutes
Description: This film is an intimate portrait of the Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. Filmmaker Estela Bravo presents rare interviews with Castro and footage of him swimming with bodyguards, visiting his childhood home and school, and trading jokes with his friend Nelson Mandela. It introduces a positive portrayal of Castro rarely shown in the US media. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 91 minutes
Description: This two-part video depicts a young Mexican-American woman’s fifteenth birthday celebration. Set in Dallas, Texas and Reynosa, Mexico, the first part consists of a discussion of the preparations, planning, and logistics that have to be considered in planning this important social event. The second part observes the actual ceremony through various stages after the preparations are completed for the mass, the party, and the dance that traditionally follow. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 38 minutes
Description: Two sisters from the state of Minas Gerais are reunited after several years apart when their father dies and are forced to confront each other about the ill feelings generated by the hurts of the distant past. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 84 minutes
Description: Patricia Amlin, the extraordinary animator who created Popol Vuh has taken authentic images from ancient Maya ceramics and turned them into a riveting retelling of the Maya creation myth. The story tells how Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca create heaven and earth, journey to the underworld to create humans and find sustenance for them, and finally create the sun and the moon. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 58 minutes
Description: Experience the heartache and uncertainty of the 1960s flight of more than 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children to the United States. The children of Operation Pedro Pan share their personal stories of the sacrifice, survival, broken hearts and new beginnings through interviews and archival footage. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description:
Description: This film documents the weeklong Mexican celebration known as Days of the Dead. This festival honors the memories of loved ones who have died. Food for the Ancestors explores this festival as it takes place in the culturally rich state of Puebla. The program is also very focused on the special food that is made for this celebration. The climatic portion of the film, and of the festival, occurs on November first when family members spend the entire night sitting at self decorated gravesites waiting for their ancestors to return. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 60 minutes
Description: A single, iconic image of Ernesto Che Guevara has been remembered, revered and reproduced over the years. In this documentary, photographer Alberto Korda recounts his feelings at the moment he snapped the world famous photo. A fast-paced collage of images follows, showing how this photo was used internationally as a symbol of inspiration in liberation and human rights struggles. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 15 minutes
Description: A collection of four short films by Venezuelan filmmaker Joseph Fabry. The first, "Tres Encuentros del Arte Hispanoamericano" (30 min.), explores the broader contours of Latin American art by examining three specific forms: the spiritual architecture of Andean Peru, the murals of post-revolutionary Mexico, and contemporary sculpture in Venezuela. The second film, "Armando Reveron" (24 min.), profiles the life of a 20th century Venezuelan artist, while the third film, "Carmelo Fernandez" (17 min.) examines the life of 19th century artist and intellectual Carmelo Fernandez. The final film, "Toros, Caballos y Hombres de Valor" (15 min.) examines the Venezuelan sport of coleado, a rodeo-like event in which competitors grab the tail of a bull while riding on horseback. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 85 minutes
Description: “An artist must be the conscience of his age.” In this way Diego Rivera, a leader of the Mexican mural renaissance movement of the 1920’s and 1030’s expressed the philosophy behind his work; in particular the spectacular series of murals he created for public buildings in the US and Mexico. Vividly exploring Rivera’s evolution as an artist, his use of the fresco technique, and his explosive political beliefs; this stunning documentary reveals one of the true geniuses of the twentieth century. Actor Michael Moriarty narrates. From the “Portrait of an Artist” series. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 35 minutes
Description: Taymor recreates the tactile passion and beauty of Frida Kahlos art as a backdrop for her life of romance and revolution. Frida chronicles the life of artist Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek), from her upbringing to her worldwide fame. The film shows the turbulence and controversy that surrounded both Frida and her husband, Diego Rivera, throughout their lives as political activists, artists, and lovers. Frida received a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe and two Oscars. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 123 minutes
Description: Visually depicts the life of Frida Kahlo through her own paintings and the surroundings of her home in Coyoacán, Mexico City. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 16 minutes
Description: A documentary about Frida Kahlo’s painful life and creative process. Part of the series “Portraits of an Artist.” Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 62 minutes
Description: On her deathbed artist Frida Kahlo (played by Ofelia Medina) conjures up images and memories of her life as a painter, revolutionary and woman of the world. Her stormy relationship with muralist Diego Rivera, her tender hospitality for exiled Leon Trotsky, her struggle for acceptance as an artist, and the travail of her illnesses and injuries are all recalled in a style reminiscent of her own work, simultaneously sophisticated and primitive, flamboyant and delicate. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 108 minutes
Description: The treatment of gays and lesbians in Cuba after the Revolution has been a topic of great controversy. This film depicts, through personal experiences, the conflicts arising in this marginalized sector of Cuban society. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 57 minutes
Description: A series of shorts from the 2004 Geografias Suaves regional film festival which feature Maya speaking peoples from Yucatan and Chiapas. The shorts include a video postcard documenting the lives and everyday experiences of children and their communities as well as stories based on folklore and oral tradition from the region. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 69 minutes
Description: Gertrudis Bocanegra Lazo de la Vega–played by award winning actress Ofelia Medina–a criollo woman who participated in the Mexican war of independence, is the central character of this film. Gertrudis becomes acutely aware of the social injustice prevalent in Mexico in the late Colonial period and gets involved in the Hidalgo’s movement for independence. Using the technique of flashback, she tells her story from her prison cell in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 98 minutes
Description: The title of this film is a play on words. By adding an "i" to the expression for coup d’etat in Spanish, its meaning has now been changed to stadium over throw. The film is full of satire that is easy to understand, intelligent, and hilarious. Soccer, as the usual common denominator of people worldwide except in the US, serves as the pretense to dish out some of the most notorious social problems in the country. Exploitation by multi nationals, companies complicity with guerrillas and thus with the drug lords, the innocence of the common people, corruption, prostitution, poverty, are all actually made quite funny. Serving as comic relief, this movie is a scathing political and social satire of all the parties involved in the nation’s problems. What brings the people "together" is their passion for soccer, and in this film, finding a way to watch the 1994 qualifying match between the Colombian national team and Argentina rises above all differences, to become top priority. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 120 minutes
Description: The director narrates this pseudo-documentary, fantasizing an invasion of mojados (wetbacks) who reconquer lost Mexican territory to create the “U.S. of Aztlán.” This new regime propagandizes by portraying Anglos with the same stereotypes employed against Latinos. Directed by Gustavo Vásquez and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 30 minutes
Description: While unfolding the story of the Cuba vs. the Baltimore Orioles games, this documentary develops a narrative of the history of baseball as an element of Cuban national identity, and the impact the sport has had on both the United States and Cuban relations. Especially interesting is the story of African Americans playing for Cuban teams, and both white and black Cubans playing in the early American Negro Leagues when baseball was segregated in the United States Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 60 minutes
Description: This film is a montage of scenes from travelogues, dramatic films, industrial films, newsreels, military footage, geography textbook illustrations and political cartoons. Together they explore the stereotyped image of Latin America in popular US media during the 20th century. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 61 minutes
Description: Since 1986, thousands of Mexican men have entered the United States to work under the auspices of the H-2A guestworker program. These men are given temporary visas to come to the United States for several months a year and provide labor in sectors such as agriculture in which American citizens are increasingly unwilling to work. The Guestworker centers on the experiences of Candelario Moreno, who works on the pepper, cucumber, and tobacco fields of Wester Farms in North Carolina. It explores the need for labor that drives the program and examines the conditions experienced by those Mexicans who make the choice to participate. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 53 minutes
Description: This documentary portrays the lives of Chiles estimated 15 – 20,000 Romanies (Gypsies) by documenting the stories of three families and their everyday struggles to reconcile their traditional culture with the advantages offered by cultural assimilation. The film brings us into the families homes, their places of worship, the childrens schools, and the markets where the men trade, where the protagonists speak, in the Romani language as well as Spanish, about their lives and their concerns as Chileans and as Romanis. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 62 minutes
Description: Cuba is a land of music and consequently a land of musicians. Habana Blues is full of lots of extraordinary music, but what makes it so special is the way Zambrano details the lives of the protagonists and the choices they are forced to make regarding their music, their families and their country. Cannes Festival Official Selection, 2005. Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 115 minutes
Type: Documentary, Year: 2008, Director: Jose Araujo, Country: Brazil, Format: DVD, Language: English, Subtitles: None
Type: Documentary, Year: 1990, Director: Felipe Bernaza, Country: Cuba, Format: DVD-R, Language: Spanish, Subtitles: English
Description: This documentary traces the history and presence of the Jewish community in Cuba. It explores the impact of the 1959 Revolution on the five percent of the original community, the community’s recent resurgence, and the international issues that affect its future. Rich in footage of Cuba, archival material and interviews, this film depicts an important history of Jewish immigration, with a focus on the particular experience of Cuban Jews. Edited by Vicente Franco and narrated by Isabel Alegría. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 57 minutes
Type: Documentary, Year: 2001, Director: Cecilia Ricciarelli and Diego Malquori, Country: Cuba, Format: DVD-R, Language: Spanish, Subtitles: English
Description: Rafael Belvedere makes his living running a restaurant and the combination of a stressful job and familial tensions are wearing him down to a frazzle. It’s been almost a year since he last paid a visit to his mother, who is battling Alzheimer’s in a retirement home. When his father decides that he wants to renew their wedding vows the affair turns out to be far more complicated than Rafael imagined. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 124 minutes
Description: Based on the research of Felipe Vázquez Palacios and his team in the state of Veracruz. This documentary depicts the daily life of those whom society considers to be old. The testimonies of these men and women teach us that the process of growing old is a construction that combines biology with work, family and society. Due to their diminishing status and lack of social support, these older adults invent survival strategies while they wait for their death. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 27 minutes
Description: Documentary including three dramatic stories about the insurrection struggle in Cuba during the 50s. The saga of young people, who lived, loved and fought with the hopes of a better future. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 81 minutes
Description: Three people travel along the lonely roads of Patagonia. Don Justo (80), the retired owner of a warehouse, flees to look for his long-missing dog. Roberto (40), a traveling salesman, follows the same road with an awkward load: a birthday cake for the son of a young widow. Traveling with her young daughter, María Flores, is a poor woman who has won the lottery on a TV program. Through traveling on their own, their paths eventually cross one another. Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 93 minutes
Description: With César Evora, Jorge Trinchet, and Daisy Granados. A young ambitious man begins climbing the social and political ladder in Cuba in the 1930s. After the fall of Machado in 1933, his political career takes off, his ethics and scruples continue to decline, and his connections to family and friends deteriorate. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 106 minutes
Description: Amid the debris of a Colombian cyclone lands an old man with enormous wings, whose seemingly miraculous anatomy attracts the curious and devout from around the world. Silent and disheveled, this fantastical “creature” is housed in a chicken coop as his host and the onlookers wait for his heavenly message, which turns out to be a mixed blessing. Original story by Gabriel García Márquez, who also co-wrote the screenplay. Part of the film series Amores Difíciles. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description: In this film based on the book by Clarice Lispector, Macabea is a young woman from the countryside of northeast Brazil who lives in the sprawling city of Sao Paulo. The mixture of bitter reality and gentle, humorous fantasy has been compared with the works of Fellini, Chaplin and DeSica, and earned Suzana Amaral’s first feature status as an instant cinematic classic. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 96 minutes
Description: A documentary about the Cuban-Jewish community in South Florida, with interviews from both Cuban-Jewish and Non-Jewish members of the community. Robert Levine began the documentary after realizing the effects of the generation gap between Cuban-Jewish teenagers and their parents and grandparents, who were originally from Cuba. Robert Levine, joined with Mark D. Szuchman, a colleague at Florida International University, began to record their interviews with the community members to reflect the views of the community members. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 27 minutes
Description: This work by Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino marked the emergence of film as a distinct cultural and aesthetic practice within the Chicano Movement. In the film, Luis Valdez gives a dramatic interpretation of Rudilfo “Corky” Gonzalez’s epic poem: I Am Joaquin, which was often distributed through mimeographed booklets to be read at rallies. This powerful film delineates all the contradictions of the Chicano experience over a 500-year genealogy of mestizo resistance. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 20 minutes
Description: How can it be that after Pinochet’s repressive regime the former general can still count on the unconditional support of so many Chileans? Constructed from a series of portraits that reveal the breadth and complexity of Pinochetism in Chile, I LOVE PINOCHET offers a unique look at the social and political system left by Augusto Pinochet, as seen from his followers point of view. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 52 minutes
Description: This film recounts the remarkable life of Benedita da Silva, the first Afro-Brazilian woman to be elected to Brazil’s senate. Her long history of struggle in the shantytowns, the women’s movement and the black movement created the base for her enormous popularity as an organizer, a politician and an international role model. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 44 minutes
Description: Deep in the rainforest of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula are the lost Mayan Cities of Chichen Itzá and Palenque. Discover their magic and learn about the Mayan culture while exploring some of the region’s most exquisite examples of pre-Hispanic American architecture. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 60 minutes
Description: Explores the mysteries of an advanced civilization’s disappearance. The miracles of the Incas are presented in this engrossing special by award winning filmmaker Luch Jarvis. Suitable for all ages, but excellent for elementary-school students. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 60 minutes
Description: This oringinal ethnographic video depicts how New Agers, the Mexican state, tourists, and 1920s archeologists all contend to “clear” the site of the antique Maya city of Chiché Itzá in order to produce their own idealized and unobstructed visions of “Maya” while the local Maya themselves struggle to occupy the site as vendors and artisans. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description: Inner Force visualizes the survival strategies that surge from the love and the talent of women. The 1980’s was a decade of extreme poverty, violence, civil wars, state repression, invasions, political crises, and a loss of institutional credibility. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 21 minutes
Description: In a mens bathroom a discussion takes place. One member of a committee votes against a presidential proposal, and suddenly becomes the hero of the democratic process. What seems to him to be a perfectly reasonable and ordinary act strikes others as a courageous and noteworthy gesture, raising questions about the true nature of popular political participation. He ultimately finds himself in an awkward position with respect to the reality he lives in. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 11 minutes
Description: This feature film tells the story of the life of Jesus in Yucatec Maya language. It is a great resource for those who want to practice and master the language. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 120 Minutes
Description: This film examines the now vibrant hip-hop community that has emerged in Cuba since the onset of the special period, interviewing numerous artists and getting their perspectives on a number of issues, including racism, issues of censorship, economic conditions, gender and sexuality, and relations with the United States. In many ways the Cuban hip-hop scene evokes memories of the culture when it first emerged in the United States in terms of its grassroots character as a form of expression for marginalized youth. Rappers comment on the significance the genre has as a form of cultural expression and social commentary, as well as the danger of Cuban hip-hop progressing down the same path of commercialization that has become so prominent in the United States. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 70 minutes
Description: An eight-year-old boy tired of living in an orphanage and working in a tortilla factory decides to search for the guardian angel his mother promised to send. The angel appears to him as a grumpy old Mexican man who teaches him the values of life, work, family, and friendship while they embark on an adventure through tropical paradises. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 98 minutes
Type: Documentary, Director: Dinamu-SNV, Country: Ecuador, Format: DVD-R, Language: Spanish, Subtitles: None
Description: Cuban boxing legend Kid Chocolate was the first Cuban to win a world boxing title, and is still considered by many as the best Cuban boxer ever. In this documentary produced by the Cuban film institute ICAIC, Chocolate recounts tales of his boxing career and experiences as a celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 19 minutes
Description: Political prisoner Valentín Arregui and homosexual pederast Luis Molina share a Brazilian prison cell in this fantastical drama from Manuel Puigs book by the same title. Molina helps pass time by recounting memories from one of his favorite films, a wartime romantic thriller that just may also be a Nazi propaganda film, in order to spur Valentins imagination and distract him from the brutal realities of political imprisonment and separation from his love. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 120 minutes
Description: This documentary retraces the decipherment of the ancient Mayan codices by an unknown Russian scholar, Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov. Due to the political tensions of the Cold War, Western scholars ignored his linguistic breakthrough. This film recounts the personal and intellectual journey that led to his discovery, and the subsequent struggle for recognition. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 57 minutes
Description: Milka has known Alexis since they were children, and loved him for as long as she can remember. When Alexis falls in love with and decides to marry another woman, Milka makes a deal with a mysterious stranger with unusual power in an attempt to win him back. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 105 minutes
Type: Documentary, Year: 1998, Director: Bran Taylor, Country: Mexico, Format: DVD-R, Language: English and Spanish, Subtitles: English
Type: Feature Film, Year: 1993, Director: Eliseo Subiela, Country: Argentina, Format: DVD-R, Language: Spanish, Subtitles: English
Type: Documentary, Year: 2001, Country: USA/Chile, Format: DVD-R, Language: English, Subtitles: None
Type: Documentary, Year: 2005, Director: Chiapas Media Project, Country: Mexico, Format: DVD, Language: Spanish and Tzeltal, Subtitles: English
Description:
Description: CBS Reports with Dan Rather presents a biography of Fidel Castro. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 60 minutes
Type: Documentary, Year: 1992, Country: Latin America, Format: DVD-R, Language: English, Subtitles: None
Description: A dramatic and sensitive analysis of the lejanía, the distance or separation among members of the same family, created by the Cuban revolution. A Cuban mother, now living in Miami, returns to visit her son whom she abandoned 10 years earlier. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description: A real world look at how the policies of globalization and free trade devastate places. Director Stephanie Black focuses on Jamaica, which has been virtually destroyed from twenty-five years of help from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. An important hit at the 2002 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, with a soundtrack by Ziggy Marley and a narration written by Jamaica Kincaid from her book A Small Place. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 86 minutes
Description: This Masterpiece Series provides a triple treat – a close-up look at the lives and works of the worlds most famous artists plus three art lessons that focus on the style of each. These lessons reinforce the techniques and skills that the artist used and students will experience hands-on learning. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 25 minutes each segment
Description: The mystical story of the Virgen of Guadalupe unfolds as Huan Francisco Urrusti identifies and explores an important aspect of Mexican culture. Through interviews with historians, priests, anthropologists, and psychologists, the role of religious syncretism in Mexican culture is analyzed, explaining the relationship between the collective unconscious and the history of the country. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 96 minutes
Description: A collection of video shorts that examine the history of Mexican cinema. This volume examines recent movies that have addressed issues concerning power, analyzing particularly the movie Morir en el Golfo (1989). Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 60 minutes
Description: A collection of short videos (los orígenes del cinematógrafico, cine mundo, Eisenstein en México, etc.) that examine the history of Mexican cinema–from the Lumière brothers’ first screenings in Mexico City at the turn of the century, to the development of a national cinema in the 1940s. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 120 minutes
Description: Filmed in San Jose, CA, this work by Rick Tejada Flores documents the art and culture of the low riders, and includes an animated title sequence by Chicano artist Rupert Garcia and music by Jorge Santana. Copies: 3 (DVD and VHS) Length: 45 minutes
Description: A playful comedy about infidelity and jealously set among members of the urban middle class. Gerard is a young attractive gynecologist who takes advantage of his profession to seduce the women of the neighborhood. His escapades set off a tragic chain of events as one woman’s husband confronts the possibility that his wife has been unfaithful. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 93 minutes
Description: This Academy award-nominated documentary about the Argentinean mothers’ movement to demand to know the fate of 30,000 "disappeared" sons and daughters is extraordinary. As well as giving an understanding of Argentinean history in the 70’s and 80’s, it shows the empowerment of women in a society where they are expected to be silent. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 64 minutes
Description: An examination of corruption and class warfare in Brazil as told through the stories of a wealthy businessman, a plastic surgeon who assists kidnapping victims and a politician whose income relies on a frog farm. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 92 minutes
Description: As one of the most prominent Afro-Colombian figures of the 20th century, Manuel Zapata Olivella did many things to promote Colombian culture and the history of African-descended peoples in Colombia. This documentary deals with various aspects of his versatile and prolific career. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 60 Minutes
Description: Manuela is the story of a mulato guajira (peasant woman) who is transformed into a revolutionary guerrilla fighter. With little dialogue and the use of hand held cameras Solas manages to convey the message and engage the viewer emotionally. A collaboration with cinematographer Jorge Herrera. Por Primera Vez is a documentary in which the crews of ICAICs Moving Cinema visit Los Mulos, in the mountains of Baracoa. There, they observe and interact with the peasants of the area who are seeing film for the first time. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 41 minutes
Description: This film examines the impact of corporate globalization on Mexico, focusing on the maquiladoras, U.S.-owned factories employing cheap Mexican labor. Archival footage and interviews provide historical background to the present crisis. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 55 minutes
Description: Based on a novel by Jorge Isaacs. This third cinematographic version of the famous story is a classical representation of Latin American melodrama. Maria is the story of Efraín, a young man who returns to the Valley of Cauca after having spent six years in a college in Bogotá. In his hometown he is pleasantly surprised by his cousin María who has become a beautiful adolescent. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 120 minutes
Description: When María Cano (Maria Eugenia Dávila) was recruited into the labor movement in Colombia in 1925 she was prepared for the revolution to come. She worked strenuously to organize workers becoming something of a folk hero. What she was not prepared for, after her five years of imprisonment (beginning 1928), was that the whole movement would lose steam and that she would have to live the rest of her life with her lost dreams of what might have been. These feelings are very strongly represented in her poetry. This biographical movie shows her life during those years, and considers her bitterness in later life Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 106 minutes
Description: The critically-acclaimed film debut from Robert Rodríguez, shot with no second takes using borrowed equipment and a talented cast of unknowns. A case of deadly mistaken identity leads the protagonist, who aspires only to be a mariachi, to trade his guitar for a gun and play for his life in this vision of bandido violence in Mexico. Copies: 1 (DVD)
Description: A rare view of what day-to-day life is like for the gay and drag community in modern Cuba. This award-winning documentary is the first since the 1959 revolution to examine the issues gays and transvestites face in the context of evolving attitudes towards homosexuality in Cuba, where people are judged first on what they achieve for their country. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 74 minutes
Description: In this rare exclusive interview, Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Márquez speaks about his best -selling novels, his role in the Latin American cinema, and his recent foray into–of all things–melodramatic soap opera. By mixing material shot in Colombia and Cuba, with historical footage and clips from his films, this video paints an impressive portrait of one of South America’s most expressive novelists. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 59 minutes
Description: This documentary goes on location to rarely seen gatherings in remote villages where masks are still an essential part of festivals such as Day of the Dead, Corpus Christi and Winter Clebrations. This video traces the ritual use of masks, beginning with Aztec priests and warriors, and explores the influence of Spanish friars who used masks to spread the teachings of Christianity. The result is a vibrant blend of indigenous and European traditions that gives this art form its distinctive flavor. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 25 minutes
Description: "O Massacre de Corumbiara" advocates the need for radical agrarian reform in Brazil through an emotional examination of a massacre of peaceful, landless rural laborers by the military police in the Amazonian state of Rondônia in August 1995. It includes testimony from witnesses to the massacre and provides a side of the story ignored or simplified by most of the mainstream press. Filmed by Georges Bourdoukan and the Chico Mendes Committee three days after the killings, the video brings the plight of landless Brazilians to non-Brazilian eyes. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 16 minutes
Description: This great exhibit shows the expressive aesthetic language and historical testimony of an admirable civilization. This is the first presentation of the maya civilization that has covered all the regions of their geographical extension, all the periods of its history and all the diversity of the people who forged it. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 52 minutes
Description: Set in Indiantown, Florida, a small, agricultural town 30 miles west of West Palm Beach, this film illustrates the challenges of a totally alien environment, exploring issues of identity, cultural integration, migration, and social change. It also demonstrated the impact 5,000 new immigrants with a foreign language and culture is having on the still predominantly white community. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 56 minutes
Description: The pioneer film maker Salvador Toscano portrayed the key events and figures of the Mexican Revolution from 1904 to 1924. Capturing the flavor and reality of war-torn Mexico, the film presents the political and military upheaval that shaped present day Mexico using exclusive, authentic footage. It also describes the women’s role in Mexico during this period. Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 50 minutes
Description: Made by Raul Ferrera-Balanquet. An exceptionally lyrical and visual video about the encounter of two young gay Mexican men in the city of Mérida, Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 7 minutes
Description: This film takes a look at the cultural wealth of prehispanic Mexico: the civilizations of the Toltecs, the Aztecs, the Mayas, and their legacies are explored. Intended for younger audiences. An Educational Video Network film. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 24
Description: This volume focuses on the rich cultural heritage of Mexico and how it affects the daily lives of its citizens. Students will find that Mexicos indigenous people and Spanish rule have influenced the ceremonial dress, folktales, foods and holidays of Mexico. Explored topics include the music of Tejano bands, the artwork of Diego Rivera and Talavera pottery from Puebla. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 24 minutes
Description: This volume focuses on how Mexicos geography has shaped its history, society and culture. Travel through a variety of land formations and regions from the desert in Sonora to the lush rainforests of Chiapas, and see how location and climate have impacted the settlement patterns and lifestyles of Mexicans. Learn about the major industries like silver mining and tourism, and appreciate the exceptionality and diversity of the Gulf Coast regions animal and plant life. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 23 minutes
Description: This volume focuses on the obstacles that Mexico has overcome throughout history to become an independent, self-governing nation. Explore history topics from the time of the Olmec through the time of independence fights as well as other more contemporary events. Understand the Father Hidalgo and Benito Juarez, and see why freedom has been so important to this proud nation. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 25 minutes
Description: Based in Mexico, a poor man struggles to make ends meet while facing the adversity of socioeconomic prejudice. Finances become worse once his ten-year-old son becomes seriously ill, and the man must find the means to heal his son. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 102 minutes
Description: This documentary depicts the story of the two Cuban worlds of Miami and Havana, and the social, cultural, and political processes that have created this divide since 1959. It provides many touching moments that portray the difficulties of this fragmentation, as well as the ideological struggles in both communities. An excellent point of departure for considering the Cuban Revolution, migration and communities of exile. Produced by the Institute for Policy Studies, USA Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 52 minutes
Description: Taken from Cuba as a child by his father, Roberto returns to the island 32 years later in search of his mother. He soon finds his American customs in conflict with those of his birthplace. Also, he discovers new revelations about his family history: though told his mother had abandoned him, Roberto learns from his cousin Pilar that his wealthy father had kidnapped him when fleeing the Revolution- leaving behind his poor black mother. Roberto, Pilar, and a driver named Antonio then take up a journey through Cuba to track her down, only to make more shocking discoveries along the way. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 123 minutes
Description: Gerardo, a gay teenager, roams the streets of Mexico City in search of someone able to reveal the secret, hidden between the lines of a goodbye letter from his ex-lover. In his journey through barren alleys and roadways, he is haunted by images: each masculine body he sees reminds him of his lover. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 80 minutes
Description: Released in 1917, this silent film focuses on the apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico. Lupita, a young woman in Mexico is concerned about her fiancée’s trip to Europe because of the war. The woman asks for the intervention of Guadalupe to protect him. Copies: 1 (DVD)
Description: Between pre-war Buenos Aires and the turbulence of Peron’s Argentina are remembrances of things past. This is the story of Miss Mary (Julie Christie) the compassionate English governess and the wealthy family that lives and dies by their inflated sense of tradition and of the broad political events and intimate personal dramas that will carve their destinies. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 100 minutes
Description: Several Maya women in the Highland community of Comalapa share their insights into the art of weaving and its place and importance in their lives. Directed by Julia Kellman and Phil Miller and filmed on location in Guatemala and Honduras. Produced by Conejo Productions. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 35 minutes
Description: This film is a musical road trip deep into the heart of Brazil. Along the trip, the director showcases the diversity and richness of the Brazilian Music. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 105 minutes
Description: The story of a young man’s attempt to fight the system is an entertaining, hilarious account of galloping bureaucracy and the tyranny of red tape.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 87 minutes
Description: Based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. This is the anecdote of the inescapable destiny of Benjamín Otálora, a man from the suburbs of Buenos Aires who became a leader of a band of smugglers in the Brazilian frontier.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 105 minutes
Description: Seventeen-year old Natividad is bored with her life in her village. Meanwhile Benjamin, fifty something, fat, and the fool of the village, is in love with Natividad. Incited by his friends, Benjamin decides to kidnap her. Leandro, Natividad’s boyfriend, interferes in the kidnapping and unleashes a violent episode which determines the fate of Natividad and restores the deteriorated image of Benjamin in the eyes of the villagers.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description: They were the women a man would silence. Robbed of their dignity and hope, they became his anonymous victims. Political prisoners, wives, mothers, writers, artists, children, lost at sea Forgotten over and over. Once deprived of their voices, they now speak.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 80 minutes
Description: A young family, determined to escape the pressures of life in Lima, struggles to exist in the exotic, overgrown Peruvian jungle. Godoy’s autobiographical story is perhaps the most honored Peruvian film of all time.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 112 minutes
Description: Produced by Samuel Franco, director of the Casa K’OJM, a private non-profit educational research center in Antigua, Guatemala dedicated to the preservation of Maya culture through music this video shows us live footage of music during daily life and special ceremonies throughout Guatemala, particularly in the Highlands. Narrated by Samuel Franco.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 25 minutes
Description: This documentary deals with the rich cultural and musical heritage of the people of the province of Yaracuey in Venezuela. It shows local people’s participation in genres as diverse as folklore music and classical and especially emphasizes the strong tradition of music instruction for children in the Casa Yaracuey. There is good footage of local dances, fiestas and interviews with poetas campesinos (farmer poets). Produced by Cartón de Venezuela.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 15 minutes
Description: The musical panorama of the region of Lambayeque shows the role placed by musical instruments and genres in delineating different cultural spheres, as well as in the conflict between traditional and modern expressions. Two large areas can be distinguished: those of the coast and of the mountains. Each expresses itself in music differently, even when both use the same musical instruments. The coastal town draws on African traditions. Communications and popular urban music have also influenced this area, significantly changing Lambayeque’s musical panorama.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 27 minutes
Description: An intriguing documentary on the life of the renowned and vibrant filmmaker. Landeta is seen in her 70’s remembering her productive years. Includes interview with filmmaker Marcela Fernandez Violante.
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 30 minutes
Description: On the history in Cuba of an extensive West Indian community (consisting of people from Jamaica, Barbados, & many others)
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 53 minutes
Description: The charming story of the brief meeting of two children from opposite socioeconomic status. One is a girl from the countryside, the other, a boy from the city on his way to the United States.
Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 17 minutes
Description: This film depicts the disturbing increase in racism, violence and intolerance along the US-Mexican border in recent years. NATIVES examines the concerns of some of the individuals involved in San Diego’s anti-immigrant movement. Relying principally on a cinema vérité style and avoiding explanatory narration, the film seeks to critique the nativist position by contrasting their professed love for their country with their racist and anti-democratic attitudes.
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 25 minutes
Description: Buñuel’s greatest depiction of religious hypocrisy. This adaptation of the novel by Benito Perez Galdos Nazarín tells the story of a simple priest who tries to live by Christian precepts and becomes an outcast and an outlaw. Considered one of the most controversial of Buñuel’s works.
Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 59 minutes
Description: Daughter of a rebel, Angustias is ostracized for her refusal to marry, her independence, and her scorn for men. She falls in love, only to be rejected because of her race and class which cause her to return to her role as a revolutionary.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 85 minutes
Description: A three-part documentary. Part I describes the phenomenon of banda dance music sweeping the Unites States and Mexico. Part II provides a history of mariachi music and its fusions with country-western and other styles, while Part III profiles Tejano music.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 30 minutes
Description: A simple story about complicated people, this movie is about the casual meeting of two friends who have not seen each other in twentysome years. While beginning with humorous satire and irony, the story takes a dramatic turn.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 95 minutes
Description: After choir rehearsals, two teenage girls, Amalia and Josefina, get together in the parish church to discuss faith, vocation and kissing. Not far from Josefina’s house is the run-down Hotel Termas, owned by Amalia’s family, where she lives with her mother Helena. A chance encounter between Amalia and Dr. Jano, who is attending a medical conference at the hotel, allows the young girl to at last find her vocation.
Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 100 minutes
Description: A polished, vastly entertaining and elaborate caper film, as well as a sharp character study that examines the question of honor among thieves. Juan is a small-time crook who gets caught conning a convenience store clerk, and Marcos is a big-time swindler who steps in to "arrest" him with the hope of recruiting him for a bigger job obtaining a counterfeit collection of some extremely rare stamps known as the Nine Queens.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 115 minutes
Description: A documentary about the Zapatista National Liberation Army’s struggle to attain justice for the Maya Indians of Chiapas. The film includes footage of various figures in the movement, including the elusive subcomandante Marcos. Produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 24 minutes
Description: Petty rivalries erupt into a local civil war in this satire of political and human follies. Based on the novel by Osvaldo Soriano.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 80 minutes
Description: This film, narrated by Edward James Olmos, presents a forceful analysis of the possibilities for radical change through Guatemalan student protest. Shot in urban ghettos, rural villages and jungle encampments, this documentary reveals the immediate and personal struggle of a cross-section of the country’s population during the forty years of civil war. Recommended for undergraduates and high school students.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 50 minutes
Description: The brutal kidnapping, torture, and killing of six out of seven high school students in 1976 is the subject of this powerful docudrama, a highly-charged, emotionally gripping condemnation of Argentina’s military rulers at that time. One of the students survived the ordeal, and this story is based on his experiences and knowledge of the tortures they endured under a military government that laid down oppressive restrictions on student activities
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 95 minutes
Description: This is a story based on real testimonies about women and AIDS.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 40 minutes
Description: Two young Jewish girls, born Mexican, shape their lives under the pressures of the early sixties and their own awareness of conflicting loyalties. The subject of the life of the Jewish community within the ethnic complexity of modern urban Mexico is new to the Mexican cinema. Novia que te vea reveals the cultural diversity of the Jewish community and the social and political attitudes that flourish in it.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 115 minutes
Description: This film documents the personal experiences and work environments of migrant workers living in North Carolina and examines the impact of their arrival on their newly adopted communities. The debate about whether illegal immigrants should be living and working in the United States is central to this film. Through many interviews with policy-makers, immigrants, religious officials, human rights workers and North Carolina residents, a complete picture of the opinions that fuel the debate is provided here. The film also examines the contours of cultural encounter and prospects for the future for these new southerners.
Copies: 3 (DVD and 2 VHS) Length: 60 minutes
Description: This successful television series is the story of how the big changes and events of the century have affected our lives. It is a story told from the experiences of the people. It is a story of big people who left footprints and of the people who participated or witnessed the significant Chilean historical events.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: aprox. 4 hours
Description: Two stories designed to teach children how to identify numbers, colors and figures in Spanish.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 20 minutes
Description: The video collection that takes you on a trip to Oaxaca to see the sites of the immensely beautiful country of Mexico.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 60 Minutes
Description: Made by Lourdes Portillo and Susana Muñoz. The very young, the old, and the deceased are all represented in this personal and affectionate filmmaker’s relationship to the history, and present-day celebrations of the Day of the Dead.
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 50 minutes
Description: In Oggun, Gloria Rolando relates the mythical story of the Yoruba god Oggun, the tireless warrior who, enamored of his mother, decided as punishment to imprison himself in the mountains: Only Ochun, goddess of love, succeeded in captivating him when she let fall a few drops of honey on the lips of the god of metal, war, progress, and civilization. This documentary includes chants, dances, a “tambor” (Yoruba religious ceremony with the bata drums), and the experiences of Lázaro Ros, a legendary Akpwon, or lead singer in the Yoruba tradition, who not only made his the beauty of the African chants, but had the opportunity to sing them in trips throughout the world.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 55 minutes
Description: A historical discussion among North American and Mexican historians about the diary and life of Rosalie Evans, a disgruntled North American property owner who lost her land during the Mexican Revolution Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 60 minutes
Description: This is a comedy drama that captures the joy and sadness of life in much of South America. It is based on the true story of four friends who decide to install a communal pirate radio station. Called Rádio Favela, this station is erected in a shanty-town to give voice to the outcasts’ complaints. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 93 minutes
Description: The legend of Orpheus and Eurydice is retold against the madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. The story is enhanced by brilliant performances, thrilling music, and magnificent color photography. Copies: 2(DVD) Length: 107 minutes
Description: A documentary about the mixture of Catholic and Afro-Brazilian religious traditions. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 30 minutes
Description: Themes of greed and redemption weave through this story of a young man’s obsessive search for gold. His quest takes him deep into the jungle and into fateful encounters with other “beings” in Bolivia’s tropical region of Cochabamba. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 35 minutes
Description: The synthetic cultural identities resulting from the forcible conversion of Mexicos indigenous people by the Spanish are explored through the eyes of Cortezs mistress Tecuíchpo and a fictional half-brother, the illegitimate son of Montezuma II. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 110 minutes
Description: Americans simply pass through the turnstiles for cheap thrills in Tijuana. Mexicans on the other side, however, face endless barriers of barbed wire, attack dogs, and armed border patrols. Alex Webb captures the odd panorama of the border. Copies: 1 Length: 10 minutes
Description: For decades, U.S. strategists-for-hire have been quietly molding the opinions of voters and the messages of candidates in elections around the world. This documentary is an astounding look at one of their campaigns and its earth-shattering aftermath. With flabbergasting access to think sessions, media training and the making of smear campaigns, we watch how the consultants’, including James Carville, marketing strategies shape the relationship between a leader and his people. The film is a shocking example of how the all-American art of branding can affect the “spreading of democracy” overseas. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 87 minutes
Description: The Xavante of central Brazil and the Wayuu of Venezuela are two indigenous groups who both face considerable challenges in their efforts to maintain control over and access to one of the most basic of natural resources, fresh water. In this compelling documentary an anthropologist from the United States collaborates with a member of the Xavante and a member of the Wayuu to explore the ways in which indigenous peoples are responding to threats to their environment and natural resources. The film focuses primarily on efforts by the Xavante to combat the deforestation and excessive use of agritoxins associated with the expanding Brazilian soy industry that threatens the viability of the Rio das Mortes as a viable water source. Through a focus on this particular movement, the filmmakers explore the close connection between the the goals of protecting our environment and defending the interests of indigenous peoples, as well as an growing solidarity among indigenous peoples throughout South America that is centered around mobilization with respect to environmental issues. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 34 minutes
Description: In Colombia’s Cauca region, the Nasa (Paez) people’s movement known as “Freedom for Mother Earth” has long fought to recover their lands. This video documents the group’s recent protest, which resulted in harsh reprisals and suffering for the community. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 22 minutes
Description: A humorous portrayal of romance, this light comedy presents a typical young Cuban couple, sexually liberated, who nonetheless cannot cope with the affair between his mother and her father. A commentary of the generation gap and machismo. Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description: Awarded best film in 1990 at the New York Festival Latino. A theater group in crisis is the setting for this story. Its aging actors, on stage as in life, confront their fears and failures. The story takes a new twist when a group of young actors join the group, unleashing a chain of unexpected events. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 110 minutes
Description: The story of the Henequen plant and its practical uses, including fiber for clothing. The documentary begins with the incidental discovery of the Henequen and moves forward in time to the development of factories for mass production of fiber. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 30 minutes
Description: This documentary provides an in-depth look at the social, economic, and environmental impact of the Pascua Lama gold mine in the Huasco Valley of northern Chile. By examining the Canadian Barrick Gold Corporation’s management of the mine, this film forces us to rethink whether such operations are actually beneficial for Chile and its citizens. In addition to exploring the negative environmental impact and associated effects on local agriculture, the films uses interviews with a number of activists who argue that these mines generate very little economic benefit for the local or national economies, and instead export profits while nationalizing costs. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 64 minutes
Description: These are two short animated films set in Bolivia, one made in Bolivia and the other in Switzerland. In “Paulina,” a condor saves an Aymara girl from being obliged to become a maid in La Paz. In “En camino,” a highland family moves to the big city to find a better life, but ultimately settles in the jungle, growing coca. (En camino is a silent film, with the German title Unterwags.) Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 9 minutes; 10 minutes
Description: Workers from the industrial ABC region of the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo are interviewed twenty-three years after their strike led by Luis Inácio "Lula" da Silva. In 1979 Brazil lived under a dictatorship and the members of the metalworkers union were the first group of workers to organize a strike during the rule of military regime. Interviews of the workers who participated in this movement appear alongside footage of their demonstrations and narrative explaining the political and economic situation in Brazil at the time. Strike leader Lula da Silva was elected president of Brazil just as production of this film was being completed. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 84 minutes
Description: A short documentary made by British TV focusing on the Shining Path movement within the city of Lima and a few villages. There are extensive interviews with members of this guerilla movement. Knowledge of the present situation in Peru is necessary before showing this film to students. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 41 minutes
Description: This film portrays the true story of Yessica and Miriam, two teens from Mexico city that start a profound friendship in middle school. The friends share notebooks, games, likes, make-up, and perfume until Jorge and El Topi, two violent accomplices, kidnap Yessica. The indifference and selfishness of the adults break the friendship of the two young girls and carry them to the brink of tragedy. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 88 minutes
Description: This is a promotional travel documentary about Peru and its resources. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 10 minutes
Description: This is a wonderful travelogue about Peru. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 8 minutes
Description: From 1979 to the early 1990s, a guerrilla war in Peru took a huge toll on the countrys economy, and an even greater one on its poorest people. This documentary probes the economic and political roots of the conflict and examines the post?war struggles of Peruvians as they strive to reconstruct their lives. The plight of rural populations displaced by the violence—committed by both sides and presented in graphic footage—is recounted by volunteers currently working to resettle them. A Free-Will Production. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 52 minutes
Description: Photographer-filmmaker Susan Meiselas returns to Nicaragua to find out what happened to the people she photographed years earlier at the height of the civil war. Meiselas and her collaborators capture the shattered lives and broken dreams of people on both sides of the conflict. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 93 minutes
Description: This comedic film gives us a nonconformist view about everything. The heroine (Daisy Granados, in the role of a lifetime) is constantly attacked by a mysterious hand that throws eggs at her house. Limited by her prejudices and fears and incapable of finding a way out of her internal conflicts, she comes to a tragic and unexpected end. Tabío also shows and criticizes real characters and situations of contemporary Cuban society. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 98 minutes
Description: The Popol Vuh, the religious book of the Maya, is the longest existing poem in an American Indian language. It stands as an extraordinary monument to the accomplishments of the Maya and their ethical, spiritual, and philosophical beliefs. This animated version begins with the account of the gods’ several creations and destructions of the world, tracing the cosmological beginnings to the awakening of the Maya civilization. Copies: 3 (DVD) Length: 58 minutes
Description: An exploration of the effects of globalization and neo-liberal policies in Haiti as reflected in the lives and daily struggles of five Haitian women living in Port-Au-Prince. These women tell compelling stories about their experiences working in factories producing items for export for wages that are far from sufficient to meet the cost of living, highlighting the ways in which Haiti has come to serve as a reserve pool of cheap labor for the global marketplace. The film explores themes such as the contraction of the agricultural sector and increased urbanization spawned by neo-liberal policies, the lack of basic services such as healthcare and education, and the gendered dimensions of the violence spawned by widespread poverty in Port-Au-Prince. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 50 minutes
Description: Five short documentaries created by the the Indigenous Video Makers Project of the Southern (Mexican) Border: "Te xa wuil a va (Que tengas el poder de mirarte a ti mismo)," directed by Linda Lothe, Cecilia Monroy Cuevas and Roberto Chankin Ortega (10 minutes, Spanish). "Kin santo ta sotzoleb (Dia de muertos en la tierra de los murcielagos)," directed by Pedro Daniel Lopez Lopez (33 minutes, Tzotzil). "Squinal Ixim (Fiesta del Maiz: El Tercer Encuentro del Maiz Maya-Zoque)," directed by Jose Angel Lopez Dominguez and Roberto Alejandro Corzo Leon (16 minutes, Spanish). "Mas de mil años despues…," directed by Pablo Chankin Najbor, Axel kohler and Tim Trench (19 minutes, Lacandon Maya). "La tierra es de quien la trabaja: Keremetik busca autonomia," directed by Pedro Daniel Lopez Lopez and Jose Miguel Hernandez (10 minutes, Spanish). Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 88 minutes
Description: This is a fiction film based on a short-story from Bolivian Andean region. Fulo, a man from a small village in Bolivia not believe old traditions regarding the existence of souls and spirits. He has to face his wife’s mysterious disappearance as a punishment for challenging these ancient beliefs. Winner of the best scenic production award at the 1999 Latin American Film and Video Festival of Indigenous Communities. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 35 minutes
Description: This film by a young Brazilian woman deals with racism as it impacts and is expressed through the daily lives of black Brazilians. It demystifies the idea that Brazilian society is without racial prejudices. Bronze medal winner at the International Film and TV Festival of New York. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 50 minutes
Description: A documentary about the Congo or Bantu religion in Cuba. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 35 minutes
Description: Shot in Cuba and the US over a period of three years, this film features remarkable cinematography by first time director Carlos Marcovich. Winner of the Latin American Cinema Prize. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 91 minutes
Description: Quilombo Country examines the communities established by runaway slaves in 19th century Brazil as they navigate the hazards of the modern world, observing the daily activities that allow the quilombolas to survive in relative isolation. This film also offers rare footage of two ceremonies and many other celebrations. Copies: 2(DVD) Length: 73 minutes
Description: Fantastic documentary about black communities in the State of Bahia. The Brazilian concept of Quilombos has come to mean the communities that were constituted out of the struggle of rebel slaves during the centuries of slavery, as territories of housing, resistance and social organization. These communities represented the enjoyment of autonomy by rebel slaves, as a reaction to white domination. Many communities now are impoverished and struggle to gain a suitable standard of living. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 127 minutes
Description: From the heart of the Altos in the Chiapaneco province of Chenalho, this community and indigenous oriented radio station broadcasts in Tzotzil and Tzeltal. The radio is an effort to strengthen their fight for justice and defend their culture and dialect. This documentary will take us on a journey through the Chiapas mountains with indigenous voices Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 19 minutes
Description: It focuses on the upheaval that the people of the isolated village of Rapayan are experiencing. Living in Peru’s highlands, they are the direct descendants of a once great civilization. As we follow Canadian archaeologist Alexis Mantha and his team searching their ancestors’s ruins, we discover a culture that has forgotten its past. Conflict arises. The ruins threaten to crumble and Rapayan’s peace is now in jeopardy. The village is going through a turning point. The signs are there. A foreigner is unearthing mummies. Past, present and future are becoming blurred as a paved road advances towards Rapayan and modernity is catching up with it’s people. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 52 minutes
Description: A documentary exploring what Cubans think and believe about race today. The film intersperses opinions expressed by everyday citizens with interviews of prominent Cuban intellectuals and artists to explore the issue of racial discrimination and inequality, a subject that is often considered taboo and divisive. Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 35 minutes
Description: March 16, 1986. Presidential address of President Reagan concerning the controversial issue. Response to the address by Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tennessee). Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 25 minutes
Description: A remarkably complicated documentary that took more than five years to complete, Recuerdos centers on Luis Frank, a Lithuanian immigrant who serves as an American spy in Paris during WWI and a republican militant in the Spanish Civil War before seeking exile in Mexico. Taking a detailed journey through Luis Frank’s rich and varied past, the film offers a remarkably personal journey through a century marked by war, remembrance, and rebirth. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 86 minutes
Description: This video contains six segments in Portuguese with no subtitles. "Turning Sadness Inside Out" (1985, 18 minutes) is about Rio’s Carnival. It is basically a musical where the lyrics somehow cements the images. "From Brazil by Brazilians" (1993, 20 minutes) is an experimental video of interviews with five Brazilian intellectuals, mixed with street and country scenes. This segment also shows how Brazilians see themselves and how they feel about the European and American perception of them. "Tupi or not Tupi" (1988, 18 minutes) contains fragments of interviews with filmmaker Vera Figueredo, famous theater director José Celso Martines Correia, writer and scholar Antonio Medina, and American composer John Cage, regarding their feelings about Brazil and Brazilian culture. "Nature Still Alive" (1993, 5 minutes) is a short work about ecology and conscience, computer edited. This segment works in analogical and metaphorical discourse, and is the result of edited images of animals with Regina Vater’s "Nature Mortes" (collection of photographs). "Green" (1991, 30 minutes) is a film made for a video installation in the Royal National Museum of Antwerp in 1992. This film is about the destruction of America’s ecology and culture by the Europeans. At the same time, it deals with the foods America provided Europe with the discoveries. The last segment of this video (1993, unfinished) contains a fragment of an hour video recording most of Regina Vater’s art works from 1979 to 1993. In this video the artist reads a statement on her ideas about art. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length:
Description: Fictionalized biography about life of Mexican singer Lucha Reyes. Lucha Reyes was an unconventional and sexually liberated woman, most famous for her "cancion ranchera" style singing. Her story begins in 1939, when at 33 she still lived at home with her mother, then she marries the liberal Pedro Calderon and then buys a beggar’s daughter, who becomes her only source of lasting love. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 117 minutes
Description: A depiction of the Aztec myth of the creation of the Fifth Sun. It also explains why the Aztecs were cast out of their "Eden" resulting in their eventual conquest. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 91 minutes
Description: Dircted by Edin Velez, Produced and written by Chon Noriega. A documentary about the work, cultural expressions, and recent exhibits of 8 latino artists, this film also provides a means to think U.S. latino identity and history. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 28 minutes
Description: Every November the Mexican people clean and decorate the graves of their loved ones, set beautiful tables or altars in which they place offerings so the visiting dead enjoy them. Experience these and other ancestral rituals of the Day of the Dead. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 20 minutes
Description: Every year in San Juan Chamula, Chiapas, in Southern Mexico, thousands of Maya Indians gather to celebrate Carnival, which they call “Festival of Games”. This award winning film, which merges Catholicism and ancient Maya rights, beautifully captures the passion and mystery of the event and shows how Maya’s symbolic world is renewed each year in the celebrations. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 59 minutes
Description: Beautifully filmed in Cuba, South Africa, Gambia, Honduras and Venezuela, Salud reveals the human dimension of the worldwide health crisis, and the central role of international cooperation in addressing glaring inequalities. The film examines the remarkable case of Cuba, a cash-strapped country with “one of the world’s best health systems,” and accompanies some of the 28,000 Cuban health professionals now serving in 68 countries. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 60 minutes
Description: This documentary narrates the story of Los San Patricios, a Irish battalion in the war against Mexico in 1843 that deserted the United States army and joined the Mexican side. They are celebrated every year in Mexico, Ireland, and in the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in New York. This video explores who they were and what convinced them to change sides by tracing their story from their origins in Ireland. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 49 minutes
Description: In Replies of the Night, Sandra Hahn uses computer animation to activate a photograph of her grandfather who died a violent death during the Days of the Dead in 1946. In Slipping Between, she creates a “visual poem” by using another member of her family that died from cancer. The video projects a palette of images transmitting an array of feeling and emotion. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 12 minutes
Description: Based on the novel by Esperanza’s Box of Saints by Maria Amparo Escandon. Santitos is a character-driven comedy about a young Mexican woman who has to come to terms with the loss of her teenage daughter. Esperanza’s daughter Blanca suddenly and mysteriously dies in the hospital where she was having her tonsils removed. Shortly afterward, the vision of a saint appears on the greasy glass door of the oven, telling Esperanza that Blanca is not dead. Despite warnings from her best friend and the local priest, she embarks on an incredible journey across the country and over the border that helps her shed her inhibitions one by one. Out comes a different Esperanza, a liberated independent woman who is also sexually uninhibited. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 105 minutes
Description: A poet from the shadows, a filmmaker with no films and an enigmatic muse. Inspired by the work of Brazilian writer and poet Rodrigo Garcia Lopes, it is a sort of “false documentary” about the poet’s time in the city of Londrina in the fifties as told through the eyes of American filmmaker Jim Kleist. Neither the poet nor the filmmaker actually existed – they are both fictional characters. Satori Uso, the poet, was invented in 1986, and his haikus were published in the literary section of local Brazilian newspaper Folha de Londrina. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 17 minutes
Description: This blockbuster Brazilian feature uses soap-opera melodrama to tell the story of a beautiful romance between a reporter and a mining company executive. But the romance crumbles when the executive’s wife, long presumed dead, returns and drives the couple, the company, and the country to the brink of a national disaster. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 86 minutes
Description: The political, social, and international implications of the custody battle over five-year-old Elián González pitted the U.S. Department of Justice, the Miami Cuban exile community and the Cuban government in a new acrimonious struggle. Documentary footage from Miami, and some from Cuba, along with interviews and observations from participants, legal observers, and US- Cuban experts. The film explores how Elián became a metaphor over the future on both sides of the Florida strait. A PBS Frontline Documentary. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 60 minutes
Description: Since it was established in 1946, the United States Army School has trained thousands of Latin American and Caribbean soldiers, among them the former dictators of Argentina, Bolivia, Honduras and Panama. This program shows how officers who studied at the school are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 18 minutes
Description: Major Joseph Blair, a former instructor at the School of the Americas, provides a fact-filled and informative portrayal of US military training and doctrine imparted to Latin American armed forces at Fort Benning, GA. Couched as a modernizing influence, the program has elicited a storm of controversy over the years because of human rights violations committed by many graduates.
Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 16 minutes
Description: A comedy about the politics of exchanging residences, which reveals the practical problems of everyday life and the conflict between traditional and revolutionary values in modern Cuba. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 105 minutes
Description: The crew of a converted French traveler studies ancient Mayan civilization and strives to acquire the science and mathematics expertise to understand it. Adventures develop observation, hypothesis formation, data collection, and analysis skills. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 24 15-minute segments
Description: This documentary investigates the kidnapping, rape and murder of over 230 young women in Juarez, Mexico. Using the testimonies of the families of the victims, the film boldly reveals a web of complicity that has contributed to the persistence of the killings. It serves as a frank portrayal of Ciudad Juarez and of the grime of the new global economy. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 74 minutes
Description: Filmed almost entirely from a helicopter, this film presents spectacular views of seven of the most important archaeological sites in Mexico: Teotihuacán, Monte Albán, Mitla, Tulum, Palenque, Chichen Itzá and Uxmal. Narrated by Orson Welles. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 18 minutes
Description: This drama centers around the friendship of two young wealthy provincial girls of the 1950s to depict a tale of seduction and infidelity, intimacy and melancholy. Through the classic Mexican game of "chance and destiny," this film by the acclaimed director Busi Cortés seeks to portray women of another time. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 86 minutes
Description: This film tells the story of two Sertanejos, the inhabitants of Sertão. Maria is the female reincarnation of Jesus, representing the strength of the Sartanejo women. She invites the Beatas (holy women) on a mission of prayer for which they journey through the countryside, witnessing social unrest among the population. Maria meets the hero of the peasants, the strong worker Antero whose history intermingles with hers. Through mythical dreams, visions, and stories heard along their journey, we witness the unfolding of Biblical prophecy in which Old Testament texts mingle with the folktales of the Sertão Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 102 minutes
Description: Shot in streets of Sao Paulo, THE SHOESHINE PRESIDENT asks Brazilians what they think about their new president, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva. From the heart of the celebrations, this film captures the heady atmosphere of history in the making–the most important chapter in Brazilian history for a generation. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 15 minutes
Description: Explores the traditions and mysteries that surround El Santuario de Chimayo, a small adobe folk church in northern New Mexico. Thousands of people make pilgrimages to see the church and its “holy dirt,” which has origins dating back to the ancient Pueblo Indians of the region. Oral interviews and narration trace the history of the church and its connection to New Mexico’s Hispanic and Indian cultural heritage. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 46 minutes
Description: A film director embarks upon a search for black women actresses to play the central dramatic role in his next project ? a musical comedy. Rather than opt for an experienced actress, he searches for the freshness and spontaneity of inexperience. By way of interviews with candidates, and the film crew, we are drawn to the underlying conflicts inherent in Cuba today. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 87 minutes
Description: With the old maestros of the tango on the verge of dying off, a young musician, Ignacio Varchausky, forms the Tango School Orchestra to ensure that the true spirit of the music is passed on to the next generation. This engaging film documents the efforts of Ignacio and Emilio Balcarce, a retired legendary violinist, bandoneonista and composer. Emilio collaborates with notable figures such as Pepe Libertella, Raúl Garello, Néstor Marconi and Ernesto Franco, amongst many more. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 79 minutes
Description: After the revolution of 1959 and the U.S. embargo that followed, the people of Cuba were left to fend for themselves. Deprived of even the most basic goods, many scavenge alleys and scrap heaps, giving new vitality to the discarded. Their recycled products are often remarkably ingenious and creative. For Andres the sculptor, Tomas the canary breeder, and the other subjects of Sin Embargo, even the greatest pressure – whether levied by government or circumstance – cannot crush the spirit nor quash the desire to forge a better life for themselves and their families. Shot entirely in Cuba, Sin Embargo is a look into the hearts and dreams of a struggling people and a tribute to their optimistic and resourceful determination to survive. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 49 minutes
Description: This chronicle of NAFTA and the Zapatista uprising includes interviews with key figured and grounds the conflict in questions of democracy and social change. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 56 minutes
Description: Sleep Dealer is a futuristic science fiction story set in a world not much different from our own, in which borders are closed, and a global, high speed network ties distant people and places together. The story centers on 3 characters who inhabit very different spaces in this world: a migrant, a soldier, and a writer. Sleep Dealer won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for both the Gotham and Independent Spirit awards. Geoffrey Gilmore, the festival director, describes the movie as “a combination of The Matrix, Blade Runner, and The Border”. Already a Latino Sci-Fi classic, this film has been praised by critics and audiences alike. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description: Tomás loves women and they love him. However, Tomás has problems -he lives in the times of DC-10’s, microwave ovens and AIDS, and this modern Don Juan doesn’t use condoms! A wonderfully funny comedy faintly reminiscent of Almodóvar. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 94 minutes
Description: In May 2006, indigenous and social organizations in Colombia were concentrated in the National Summit Traveling with sectoral actions. They demanded a national referendum against the Free Trade Agreement and the fulfillment of agreements signed with the Government for twenty years. This film tells the contempt, betrayal and brutality of the Colombian state against communities that were peacefully demanding their rights. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 24 minutes
Description: Ex-cop turned private eye Fernando Solórzano gets roped into investigating the murder of unidentified hooker Flora Martínez at a cheap Bogotá hotel; and, as the flashbacks unreel in classic film noir fashion, he starts to piece together her life through her relationships with a failed boxer, a blind lottery salesman, a cowardly bullfighter and a corrupt politician. However, as her real identity starts to emerge, Solórzano gradually realizes that he will have to take a personal interest in the case. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 110 minutes
Description: A musical documentary about choro, the first genuinely urban Brazilian music, which blended European, Afro-Brazilian and indigenous elements and formed the basis for popular musical styles such as Samba and Bossa Nova. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description: Music is an important expression of Mexico’s cultural richness, and has always accompanied mostly all the activities of the Mexican people. Get to know through this program the most representative music, complemented with typical handicrafts and regional dresses of Mexico, in a magnificent colonial setting. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 45 minutes
Description: Silent motion picture footage of the Spanish-Cuban-American War and the subsequent Philippine insurrection produced by Edison pictures between 1898 and 1901. The two conflicts were the first in which the motion picture camera played a role. Most footage is staged for the hand-cranked camera, but views of ships, parades, and notable figures is also included. Silent with English captions Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 70 minutes
Description: The moving account of the people of Matamoros, Mexico after the Chicago-based Stepan plant dumped zylene, a toxic solvent linked to birth defects, into open canals near their homes. The Sanchez family and their community, with the help of the U.S.-based Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, demanded an end to the contamination and a full accounting from Stepan. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 18 minutes
Description: The Stories of My Grandparents is a long-term project that brings to life the Mayan legends that are such an important part of the Yucatec Maya oral tradition. The project is inspired in Ana Rosa Suarte’s first attempts to put the stories that she heard as a child in video. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 15 minutes
Description: Filmed on location in Durham, North Carolina, Los Sueños de Angélica follows the life of a Latino couple striving to enter the mainstream of American society. Angélica and Roberto work multiple jobs and take English classes as a means of realizing their desire to move ahead financially in the United States. At the same time they are torn between their new lives and a desire to return home to the land of their birth and recreate a new life there. Unexpected changes bring these tensions to the fore and push the couple to decide between these two desires. This film provides a window into the everyday lives and consciousness of Latino immigrants while exploring the process of buying a home in the United States. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 82 minutes
Description: The sequel to Los Sueños de Angelica picks up 10 years later with the lives of a latino couple living in Durham. The recession has left Roberto without a job for some time, and he and his wife Angelica decide to start a cleaning business. After initial failures he finds himself on his way to starting a business that weds traditional knowledge with notions of sustainability and green practices.In order to get the venture going, Roberto and Angelica take classes on how to start a business at the Latino Cooperative Credit Union. In addition to relating an entertaining story with endearing characters, this film provides instructional information the steps necessary to start a new business and traces the shifting nature of the lives of latinos in the United States after they have established roots and become long-standing members of their local communities. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 102 minutes
Description: Dawn breaks in La Habana, and as the day advances we follow the simple lives of ten ordinary Cubans, with only sounds and images accompanied by music. The film documents a day in the life of Cubans who struggle with the harsher side of life in revolutionary Cuba. The adults do not smile or utter a single word throughout the film. Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 86 minutes
Description: In this mix of live action and comic book style animation, five masked activists fight against corruption, homophobia, animal rights, pollution and poverty in Mexico City. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 70 minutes
Description: A humorous and touching view of Cuban exiles living in a basement apartment during a snowy winter in New York, El Super is the story of Roberto, a superintendent who dreams of his warm and friendly homeland and stubbornly refuses to assimilate into the new culture. Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 80 minutes
Description: Sistren Theatre’s documentary on Jamaican women sugar cane workers, combining theater and interviews. Copies: 1 Length: 40 minutes
Description: A UNICEF style documentary showing the hardships of the Tarahumara Indians and how a local hospital attempts to remedy them.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 25 minutes
Description: This is a documentary about the religious life in Latin America. Many of the conquerors saw no contradiction between enslaving the Indians and bringing their souls into Paradise. But turning temples into churches was one thing, and transforming native religions into Christianity quite another. This program shows that, although the religious emblems are Christian in most parts of Latin America, the native people still pray to the "old" gods of pre-Columbian times.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 28 minutes
Description: One of the great art films of the Brazilian Cinema Novo, director Rocha’s 1967 work is a meditation on the ambiguities of political power, revolutionary ideologies, and the transformative potential of art. It is a satirical film, based on a real life politician. The political allegory follows its protagonist narrator, a fictional poet, as he recalls the events leading up to his demise.
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 115 minutes
Description:The most highly praised and awarded Mexican documentary in many years, THE INHERITORS by Eugenio Polgovsky immerses us in the daily lives of children who, with their families, survive only by their unrelenting labor. The film takes us into the agricultural fields, where children barely bigger than the buckets they carry, work long hours, in often hazardous conditions, picking tomatoes, peppers, or beans, for which they are paid by weight. Infants in baskets are left alone in the hot sun, or are breast-fed by mothers while they pick crops. The indelible impression conveyed by THE INHERITORS, in which everyone-from the frailest elders to the smallest of toddlers-must work reveals how the cycle of poverty is passed on, from one generation to another.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90minutes
Description: A story about a young girl, Tieta thrown out of her house for sexual indiscretions, only to return 26 years later triumphantly as the rich and powerful widow of an industrialist. Tieta and Leonora, whom she introduces as her stepdaughter, inspire an upheaval in the Life of SantAna. In the midst of all the uproar, the darkest secret of Tietas life is revealed and she is forced to leave the village once again. Feature.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 115 minutes
Description: A beautiful recorrida of Tikal, Guatemala’s most visited archeological site. There are aerial views of the sites, close-ups and excellent photography of the landscape around the site. Tikal is shown in detail from every direction, and good explanations of many of the monuments are included. It also provides good background information on the Maya.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 50 minutes
Description: At the end of the alpaca’s bearing season, the shepherds of Tata Wara-Wara, a highland village in the region of Arequipa, get ready to perform a deeply rooted Andean tradition known as the tinka de alpaca. This ceremony, in which the animals are paid homage and counted, is accompanied by rituals giving thanks to Pachamama, the earth goddess. The force of her fertility is sought to secure the abundance of pasture and an increase in livestock.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 17 minutes
Description: This film was a major watershed for the New Latin American Cinema, the source of a renovating movement that some years later spread throughout Latin America. With a new documentary style, the film focused on the undeveloped suburbs of a city, Santa Fe, Argentina. Birri and his crew succeeded in filming a moving document about extreme poverty, and the main protagonists were children with no future. One of its main sequences — in which children run barefoot beside a train and along a very narrow and dangerous bridge begging for a dime (“tire dié”) — is one of the most memorable scenes.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 33 minutes
Description: This documentary represents the culmination of four years of investigation into the military operations behind the October 1968 massacre of students at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlateloco, Mexico. It incorporates all known film footage related to the events of October 2, 1968 and presents evidence that documents the steps taken by the government and other repressive forces against the student movement.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 57 minutes
Description: To Play and To Fight presents the captivating story of the Venezuelan Youth Orchestra System – an incredible network of hundreds of orchestras formed within most of Venezuela’s towns and villages. Once a modest program designed to expose rural children to the wonders of music, the system has become one of the most important and beautiful social phenomena in modern history. The documentary portrays the inspirational stories of world class musicians trained by the Venezuelan system, including the Berlin Philharmonic’s youngest player Edicson Ruiz and world renowned conductor Gustavo Dudamel. With interviews with many of the world’s most celebrated musicians including the great tenor Placido Domingo, Claudio Abbado, Sir Simon Rattle, Guiseppe Sinopoli, and Eduardo Mata, To Play and To Fight is an inspirational story of courage, determination, ambition, and love showing us that… only those who dream can achieve the impossible.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 70 minutes
Description: A documentary about Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 45 minutes
Description: For over four years, three Colombian filmmakers turned their cameras on themselves, using personal stories to expose the tough reality in their violent, war-ravaged country. Their portrayal does not aim to confirm the image the outside world has of Colombia as a hotbed of excessive political violence and drug traffic, but instead draws out the beauty and warmth of the people amidst the larger turmoil within their homeland.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 78 minutes
Description: Textbooks tell the dramatic story of the imprisoned Inca who paid a ransom of a roomful of gold to the Spanish Conquistador Francisco Pizarro and, for most people, this event in 1532 and the subsequent fall of the Inca empire, marks the beginning of the history of Peru. However, Dr. Dwayne L. Merry, noted anthropologist and archaeologist, demonstrates that the Incas built their civilization on previous cultures dating back more than 3,000 years.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 75 minutes
Description: Tour the natural and historical treasures of one of the world’s most diverse continents, including a meeting with two unique creatures of the Galapagos that intrigued Charles Darwin. Viewers will also travel to the ruins of the ancient Inca city of Cuzco, Peru, and see the majestic cataracts at Iguacu Falls, where water and gravity collide.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 26 minutes
Description: A young musician from the poor suburbs of Rio searches for his lost love. From Guadalupe to the cosmopolitan south zone, Vinicius embarks on an almost mythic urban odyssey. Vinicius’ journey, both tragic and comic leads ultimately to redemption. For having lost all innocence, he is redeemed by the irrepressible life-forces of poetry and the wailing of a single saxophone in a Brazilian night.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 103 minutes
Description: Ruled by a tough grandma (Sara García), the Garcías (Infante, Salazar and Mendoza) are three charro cousins who fall in love with young American-born Lupita (Marga López) and fight for her love until grandma quiets them. It is a Mexican classic.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Description: The grim and bitter detective Ferran decides the murder of a prominent mobster was not a crime of passion but the result of a deeper conspiracy. He sets out on a journey through the strange universe of Latin American nightclubs to solve the murder.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 105 minutes
Description: In this first volume of the three part film series about Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina and his thirty year dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, the focus lays in the Trujillo’s rise to power and the early years of his rule.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 75 minutes
Description: In the second episode of this film series detailing Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina and his thirty year dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, the director focuses on the bulk of Trujillos reign, and how it impacted the Dominican people.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 95 minutes
Description: In the conclusion to this trilogy of documentaries about the thirty year dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina in the Dominican Republic, we see the end of an era, as the final years of Trujillos rule play out and end with his assassination.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 80 minutes
Description: This film portrays daily life in an underdeveloped and overpopulated city on the Pacific coast of Colombia. Tumaco is a city inhabited mainly by Afro-Colombians which depends on fishing as its principal economic activity, a way of life threatened by the accumulation of pollution in the sea and connected waterways. Residents live in houses standing on stilts over the ocean, with no proper water or sanitation systems. Residents of the town share their life stories, their modes of earning a living and reflections on their struggle to secure improved working and living conditions and overcome poverty. Award winner, 26th Latin American Film Festival Bordeaux, France (Public Award) & First Award best feature length documentary film 2009 FESALP Film Festival, La Plata. Argentina.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description: Based on an incident in Cuban colonial history, this masterful film tells the story of a pious 18th century slave owner who reenacts the last supper, portraying himself as Christ, and with twelve slaves selected to play the disciples. He selects a rebellious slave to be Judas, leading to the brilliant supper scene with ominous undercurrents of imminent reckoning.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 110 minutes
Description: The Mexican Revolution is on its way when six brave peasants, known as "Los Leones de San Pablo", decide to join Pancho Villa’s army and help end the suffering in their community by assisting in the struggle.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 87 Minutes
Description: This hilarious animated spoof of horror and gangster movies, presented in an outrageously caricatured style reminiscent of Fritz the Cat, features Professor Von Dracula, a vampire scientist who leaves Transylvania for Cuba, where he invents "Vampisol," a potion that allows vampires to survive in sunlight. The action escalates crazily with bad guys, police, vampires and other monsters all caught up in a crazy chase.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 75 minutes
Description: A view into the family values and Catholic guilt in a Latino community. This film examines the tragic-comic problems that a Puerto Rican teen creates for herself when she decides to take attention by saying that she is pregnant.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 29 minutes
Description: This documentary seeks to get beyond the cult of personality of Hugo Chavez to gain a deeper understanding of what the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has meant for many citizens at the local level. Through interviews with government officials, community memebers and scholars such as former Duke Mellon visiting professor Steve Ellner, the film examines political developments of the last twenty years from the perspective of popular participation. Beginning with a brief discussion of the Caracazo of 1988, the documentary looks at the role that grassroots mobilization in the form of cooperatives and other locally-based organizations in efforts to reshape Venezuelan economy and society.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 85 minutes
Description: After having spent part of her life in an orphanage/reform school (where she learned that this is a man’s world), Vera attempts assimilation into polite Brazilian society. However, by the time she leaves the orphanage she is convinced that she is a man inhabiting a woman’s body. A movie about gender formation and deformation.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 87 minutes
Description: Written by Nobel Prize winning Gabriel García Márquez, this is a wickedly black comedy about two children plotting to kill their authoritarian nanny, reminiscent of the work of the legendary film maker Luis Buñuel. Directed by Humberto Hermosillo. Part of the film series Amores Difíciles.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 85 minutes
Description: The most honored Argentine film of 1990, directed by Miguel Pereira won four Silver Condors and a Silver Bear. It is the story of the life of an Indian boy from birth in one of the most remote parts of Argentina, the province of Jujuy, until his death in the far-off south Atlantic during the Malvinas/Falklands War. Veroníco’s mother does not survive his birth and he is left in the care of his grandmother to grow up in solitude and isolation. How Veroníco’s dreams affect his fate forms the crux of this beautiful film.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 90 minutes
Description: This documentary examines the issue of the ineligibility of undocumented immigrants for in-state tuition at North Carolina’s public universities and how this situation affects the lives of college-aged Latino students. Director Maurice M. Martinez examines this controversial topic through the stories of three such students who were born to poor farm workers in Mexico. They have spent much of their lives in the U.S. and are struggling to find the financial resources to attend college. Other topics covered include misconceptions of the Latino community, the conditions of agricultural labor and the impact of Latinos on the economy.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Description: A docudrama originally produced for Mexican television. Based on true stories this beautiful film traces the life of a Mexican woman in a small town faced with the realization that she has AIDS. The film deals with the stigma attached to AIDS in contemporary Mexican culture and the efforts of the medical system in dealing with this growing crisis.
Copies: 1 Length: 30 minutes
Description: This film takes place in the years 1940 to 1942, between the two great droughts that devastated the Brazilian Nordeste (Northeast). The movie, based on a novel by Graciliano Ramos, is a meditation about the agrarian question and the problem of migration to the Northeast regions of Brazil.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 105 minutes
Description: A raucous home video is the focus of this hilarious film. What begins as a simple taped message to an expatriate son unveils the complexity and often humorous travails of a contemporary Cuban family. On the eve of Raulitos birthday, his family decides to send a videotaped greeting from Cuba to his home in the United States. Everything goes well with the videotaping until his sister reveals a secret: Raulito is gay. Family chaos ensues, and as the videotape rolls Raulitos outing brings forth his fathers bitterness toward his son for leaving Cuba.
Copies: 2 (DVD) Length: 47 minutes
Description:A project organized by the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista in which different indigenous groups in the Amazon have been provided with video training and equipment. Uses include recording ceremonies for future generations, taping political discussions, recording the promises of government officials, and documenting their struggles for the environment and their lands.
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 10 Minutes
Description: The history of Cuba told through a collage of photos and other archival materials.
Copies: 1 Length: 100 minutes
Description:
Humans have always been narrators of stories, legends, fables and in places where there were no books or novels, stories have been passed down through word of mouth from one generation to the next. This social function is still alive in some communities in the Yucatan Peninsula where an elderly person has family-related stories or historical events that he/she experienced personally. Historical memory is in this kind of stories, the great compliment of temporality to bring unity to those basic aspects of the culture, traditions, beliefs and worldview of the Yucatecan Maya people.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Description: Produced by the Latinos in West Michigan Project, this video includes three segments of interviews with Latino citizens from Grand Rapids, Holland, and Muskegon. Featured narrators are: Mercedes Toohey, Marilia Blakely, Jurisa Negrón from Grand Rapids; Nereida García and Tino Reyes from Holland; and Connie Navarro, Tomassa Ybarra, and Joe Garza, Jr. from Muskegon.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 30 minutes
Description: This documentary denounces the CIA’s involvement in internal Cuban affairs and its active aggression against the Cuban government. This film offers a straightforward presentation of facts, and contains footage of actual espionage activities as well as a reading of names of CIA agents known to be active in Cuba. Produced by Cuban television.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 33 minutes
Description: A short drama set in the past tells a story of how the Mapuche dealt with wrongdoing in the community.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 27 minutes
Description: Explains how a group of about fifty-five black women from the poor neighborhoods of Kingston, Jamaica have broken tradition by establishing their own carpentry and construction business. Shows how they are trained and how the business has prospered, resulting in contracts with commercial businesses.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 14 minutes
Description: In the Andes, the time for celebrating propitiatory rituals coincides with the carnival season. One such ritual is the wylancha; in which members of the community of MOLLOKO, in the Acora district of Puno, offer their alpacas to the mountains and the earth, their protecting divinities.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 28 minutes
Description: A diamond rush in the 1700s transformed Brazil’s interior into a place of fabulous wealth and excess. In this unrestrained atmosphere, the slave Xica uses her iron will and her unique sexual talent to seduce her way into becoming the unofficial Empress of Brazil, lording it over her former masters and gleefully emptying the crown’s treasury.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 109 minutes
Description: Documenting the most important ritual of the Enauêne-Nawê Indians, the seven months every year that the spirits of the dead are venerated with offerings of food, song, and dance so they will protect the community and bless it with an abundant harvest and great quantities of fish.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 75 minutes
Description: In this tale of fantasy and folklore, Yanco, a small Indian boy, is considered bewitched because of his hypersensitivity to sound. When his music teacher dies, the boy begins to play mysterious melodies during the night. His talent reaches such a peak that the villagers feel that it is the old teacher coming back to haunt the village.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 85 minutes
Description: An EVA film intended for younger audiences. Short documentary traces the career of a young Mexican man trying for a career as a torero in the ring.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Description: A fascinating travel view of the legendary ruins of Chichen Itza, Tulum, Uxmal and many other ancient Mayan sites, including visits to Merida, a city of contrasting sights, cultural blends and people.
Copies: 1 (DVD)
Description: A musical phenomenon in 1960’s Cuba, Los Zafiros brilliant mix of American-inspired Doo-Wop and traditional Latin forms caused an international sensation. Music from the Edge of Time explores the memories of Manuel Galban and Miguel Cancio, the two surviving members of Los Zafiros, as they are reunited in Havana. The film also features the perspectives of numerous Zafiros family members in Miami and Havana, international musicologists, and musical colleagues of the group. In evoking the Cuban post-revolutionary epoch of the 1960s, this feature-length documentary presents a vivid, moving, and balanced portrait of the remarkable musical success story that was Los Zafiros.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 84 minutes
Description: In 1994 the Zapatistas reclaimed land in Chiapas’ Lacandon jungle in southern Mexico to found the Autonomous Municipality of Emiliano Zapata. Since then, they have been building a new society in which there are neither servants nor bosses. Members of the community ensure their autonomy by tending to an organic vegetable garden and working collectively in all endeavors.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 19 minutes
Description: In August 1942, the murder of a young Mexican American man ignited a firestorm in Los Angeles. The press claimed Mexican youth – know as “zoot-suiters” for the clothes they wore – were terrorizing the city with crime. The police arrested 600 Mexican Americans while seventeen were found guilty for murder despite a lack of evidence. With stunning film noir re-creations, evocative original photography and moving interviews, this documentary tells the story of the trial and the resulting violent events of the summer of 1943.
Copies: 1 (DVD) Length: 60 minutes
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