Description: In this groundbreaking satirical film about the Cuban Revolution, the craziest situations are seen as normal by most of the inhabitants of Wondertown. Alicia, however, struggles to make sense of what is happening around her from the moment she arrives. This film by Daniel Diaz Torres mixes absurdity, humor and horror, and was banned because it was believed to be anti-revolutionary.
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS)
Description: “Capital Sins” Part of a 10-part PBS series on the western hemisphere, this program examines the trajectory of Brazil’s economy from the mid 1960s through the 1980s, spotlighting the methods Brazil’s rulers chose to develop that country and how their choices affected the lives of ordinary Brazilians. Beginning with the rapid growth of the late 1960s and 1970s known as the “Brazilian Miracle,” it examines the cost of this growth in terms of the repression of the military regime of that period, as well as the growing inequality of the 1970s and the debt crisis of the 1980s. The transition to democratic rule in the 1980s is also covered. Interviews with members of the military regime and its opponents, including current President Luis Ignacio “Lula” Da Silva and politician Benedita Da Silva, complement the documentary’s narrative.
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS)
Length: 60 minutes
Description: “In Women’s Hands” This program set in Chile, examines the changes women of every social class made when they organized during the Pinochet years to create better living conditions for their families.
Copies: 1 (DVD and VHS)
Length: 60 minutes
Description:This film is a bold, intensely emotional, and ambitious story of lives that collide in a Mexico City car crash. Inventively structured as a triptych of overlapping and intersecting narratives, Amores Perros explores the lives of disparate characters who are catapulted into unforeseen dramatic situations.
Copies: 3 (DVD and VHS)
Length: 153 minutes
Description: A moving and powerful portrait of the life of a poor Mexican American boy and his migrant farm worker family, as they struggle to adapt to life in American society. Adapted from the novel “…y no se lo trago la tierra” by Thomas Rivera. Through its many human stories of growing up as a Mexican American the story exposes the rich cultural traditions which have given shape to life in the American Southwest
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS)
Length: 100 minutes
Description: A tragic urban story about the unfortunate life of a 13-year old circus girl in Mexico City. She is expelled from her job when the official of the circus finds out she is pregnant. She meets a troupe of traveling puppeteers preaching the word of God and joins them, eventually entrusting her son to God.
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS)
Length: 90 minutes
Description: This documentary introduces us to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico, home to an indigenous Zapotec society where gender and sexual preference are a fluid concept. The women dominate the home and businesses, while the men do much of the heavy hauling and seem happy to let women rule. The matriarchy also fosters the area’s progressive politics, which include standing up to the PRI and warding off the global market.
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS)
Length: 74 minutes
Description: Documentary films of the borderland between Texas and Mexico. Norteña music filled with the poetry of daily life-love songs, passion, death, humor, and loss is explored from dancehalls, small towns, and family gatherings.
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 90 minutes total (58 minutes first film, 28 minutes second film)
Description: A fascinating cinematic mix of documentary and fiction, Gómez (who died just before completing work on the film) looks at the marginal neighborhoods of Havana shortly after the triumph of the 1959 Revolution. With Mario Balmaseda and Yolanda Cuellar. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 79 minutes
Description: During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a misplaced gringo in Mexico City helplessly watches the atrocities through Mexican television news. Taking a tip from his local neighbors, he begins to sell chewing gum and wash car windows in the streets…to raise money for a guerrilla army to take out Bush. “Gringo-thon” is a personal expression of protest of an expatriate living abroad and a meditation of the complexities of “gringo” identity. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 17 minutes
Description: This documentary challenges the popular understanding that the Wright brothers were the “first in flight.” It treats the life of Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont and his mission to create “heavier than air” flying technology. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 38 minutes
Description: Argentine director Eliseo Subiela’s stunning and powerful masterpiece. A man named Rantes suddenly appears in a Buenos Aires psychiatric hospital expertly playing the organ. But who is he –this man with no recorded identity? Beatriz, his only visitor, sees him as an intimate and knowing companion. The other patients, intrigued by his mysterious intelligence, see him as their only source of hope. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 105 minutes
Description: This 1950 masterpiece, directed by Luis Buñuel, portrays the misery of poverty with an astounding starkness. Poor children of Mexican slums are the primary subjects of this unconstrained vision of poverty. In many big cities, behind the large buildings are areas of complete misery. Children are malnourished, there are no schools, sanitation is not up to par and delinquents abound. Los Olvidados has been called a work of free art, a testimonial, an aesthetic expression of moral conscience. The film is an effective protest against human cruelty. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 90 minutes
Description: This is a silent film that focuses on opium addiction in early twentieth century Mexico. It is combined with stories of bandits and a poor detective who strives to be like the then famous Nick Carter. EL PUÑO DE HIERRO was the first movie that touched upon the issue of drug addiction in Mexico. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS)
Description: A dramatization on John Reeds newspaper account of the Mexican Revolution. This film explores the young journalists adventures with Pancho Villas army in 1913-1914. Through encounters with Generals Villa and Urbina as well as ordinary soldiers, Reed sheds his journalistic impartiality and becomes a potent advocate of the Revolution. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 104 minutes
Description: Directed by Karim Ainouz, a young Brazilian American filmmaker, who traveled back to his home in Brazil to interview on film his five delightfully eccentric unmarried or widowed aunts on their views of love, family and marriage. These women all in their eighties or nineties seem more liberated and more at ease with certain issues than many people of today.
Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS)
Description: In Uruguay in the early 1970s, an official of the US Agency for International Development (a group used as a front for training foreign police in counterinsurgency methods) is kidnapped by a group of urban guerillas. Using his interrogation as a backdrop, the film explores the often brutal consequences of the struggle between Uruguay’s government and the leftist Tupamaro guerillas. Copies: 2 (DVD and VHS) Length: 115 minutes
Description: The first and last documentary by 18-year old Ben Gutierrez is a highly informative look at graffiti that breaks the art form down into four distinct categories: “peacing,” gang style, tagging, and mural art. Gutierrez was shot and killed in the winter of 1990. Copies: 1 (DVD and VHS) Length: 5 minutes
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