Houses of FireGet Details and Purchasing Info Juan Bautista Stagnaro feature 107 minutes 1995
With English subtitles
Based on the life of Salvador Mazza, the story of a famous doctor who devoted his life to discovering a cure for Chagas disease. Faced with prejudice from both the medical community, which chooses to ignore the existence of the disease, and the bourgeoisie, which chooses to ignore its cause, Salvador sets off with his wife to conduct research in the remote villages where the disease is rampant. Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Origin of Babies According to Kiki Cavalcanti, TheGet Details and Purchasing Info Anna Muylaert/Pico Garcez Fiction 15 minutes 1996
With English subtitles
A delightful sitcom about children's misunderstandings about adult's sexual life and how babies are born. Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Other StoriesGet Details and Purchasing Info Pedro Bial Feature 104 minutes 1999
With English subtitles
This film is based on short stories by Guimaraes Rosa. The action takes place at a small city in Minas Gerais countryside. All the city could think of was the burial of a frightening outlaw who died through the hands of a nice young man acting in self'defense. Everybody is waiting for the revenge by the deceased's three brothers. During the wake, people recollect stories of the thug's life, but the bandit's burial ends in an unexpected anticlimax.And it's time for us to follow another story which is almost a fairy tale. When a farmer looses his wife, he decides to make big changes in his domain: he divides and gives away his land to the peasants. Nevertheless, the ones who received the land end up hating that magnanimous king.Right after that, at a next-door farm, another landowner falls in love with the most unassuming of his peasants. While breaking the white tapioca on the stone slab, the girl throws a spell in order to have her master's heart forever. Will it work?At the grand finale, we end with the story of three characters who show up in small parts during the movie. The cattle slaughter, his mother and his daughter. Since the two women are crazy, he is taking them to the train station to go to an asylum in Barbacena, locked up in a barred coach. Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Venezuela-Diego Risquez's Triology
America, Unknown LandGet Details Diego Risquez feature 98 minutes 1988
With English subtitles
"Amerika tierra incognita", is the third in director Risquez' trilogy of avant-garde cinematic meditations on Latin American history and the relation between Europeans and indigenous peoples. Familiar images, such as the arrival of European conquistadors in the Americas, are made unfamiliar through the principle of inversion. Rather than following the journey of the Europeans westward, we witness the capture and subsequent voyage to Europe of a young Amerindian man. Instead of the romantic portrayal of the scantily clad indigenous woman seduced by the European discoverer, it is the European princess who falls in love with the Amerindian. Director Risquez' penchant for playing with the boundaries between art and reality is aptly realized as the trilogy defies conventional cinema by refusing dialogue and traditional plot techniques.
Orinoko, New WorldGet Details Diego Risquez Feature 90 minutes 1984
With English subtitles
With layers of hallucinations and no dialogue, "Orinoko" narrates the Spanish and English explorations of the Orinoco river and the quest for El dorado, first by Columbus, and subsequently by Alexander von Humboldt. These explorers encounter and initiate the destruction of the indigenous communities they meet. With magnificent photography and a haunting soundtrack, the film captures the first explorers' phantasmagoric experience. The film begins before the encounter with a stunning sequence of an Amerindian tribe going about their daily activities. Each shot seems meant to distance and disorient the viewers, compelling us to decipher each action, much as the conquistadors may have done. When the European characters make their appearance on the Orinoco, they are filmed in an equally opaque manner. No word is spoken; it is a silent adventure, except for the strange and ominous sounds of the jungle. Viewers are not encouraged to identify with these strange, rather bizarre, yet colorful individuals. Toward the end of the film, it becomes clear that the entire experience of the Europeans has been filmed from the point of view of a Yanomami shaman in a drug-induced trance.
Bolivar, Tropical SymphonyGet Details Diego Risquez feature 75 minutes 1980
With English subtitles
This is the first of Diego Risquez' trilogy of avant-garde cinematic treatments of historical subjects. Using a painterly style, it features portraits, still lifes, and scenes shot as tableaux vivants. The film provides an experimental interpretation of the arrival of the Spanish and their domination of the New World, as well as the Venezuelan Independence movement, focusing on the role of Simón Bolívar. There is no dialogue or narration, simply a musical score and the depiction of events from Bolívar's career. Although seen as heroic in many respects, Bolívar is not treated as a saviour. The film attempts to be a synthesis of Venezuelan history. Two actors play the role of Bolívar. One represents a Bolívar known through text books: a superhero, an emperor in Napoleon's era. The other is the romantic warrior, the revolutionary, the lover, the man. No dialogue
Documentaries
Ghosts in PatagoniaGet Details and Purchasing Info Claudio Remedi Documentary 84 minutes 1996
With English subtitles
The "unemployment ghost" travels through Sierra Grande, in Argentina's Patagonia. The government decreed the closure of the iron mine, the town's principal source of income. In this isolated town a few people survive, struggling against unemployment and its social consequences. This documentary explores the destruction of a town through the personal stories of its inhabitants. Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Metal and MelancholyGet Details and Purchasing Info Heddy Honigmann Documentary 80 minutes 1993
With English subtitles
A romantic. A mystic. A film and TV actor. A secret service agent. A housewife. A businessman. A military aviator. Whatever they were, or are from 9 to 5, they are all now taxi drivers of last resort, working toward the dream of a better future in the teeming metropolis of the Peruvian capital. With the current economic crisis, thousands of members of Lima’s former middle class rely on the only things that they haven’t lost – their ingenuity, fighting spirit, zest for life … and their cars. And so they slap a TAXI sticker on the windshields and throw themselves into the cutthroat competition and the insanity of Lima traffic. Venerated director Heddy Honigman – a naturalized Dutch citizen born and raised in Peru – returns in this film to the land of her birth to present its current situation through profiles of members of the former middle class who have been hardest hit by the economic decline. From the passenger seat, Honigman captures how these men and women deal with their bitterness – singing to their cars, philosophizing, cursing the traffic, and gossiping with their customers. One calls taxi drivers “the seafarers of the 20th century” and compares his journeys on Lima’s potholed streets to those of “an astronaut landed on a polluted moon.” Another, smiling at his dilapidated jalopy cheerfully pronounces that his car “has an advantage. No one can steal it…It wouldn’t make it 30 blocks!” In glimpses through open windows and windshields, we see the hunger, desperation, and stoic resolve of Lima, where vendors young and old hawk chewing gum, plastic animals, a magic pyramid, a fully-rigged model frigate…and TAXI stickers. With her driver-protagonists, she visits the places they want to take her – a family's modest flat, a dead relative's fixer-upper, and even the municipal graveyard. Honigman’s compassionate depictions and expert cinematography represent the human side of the Latin America’s economic crisis – a taxi-trip through Lima that is also a portrayal of human determination and resilience. Purchase Price: $ 99.95
CampesinosGet Details and Purchasing Info Eldon Kenworthy Documentary 46 minutes 1998
With English subtitles
Three interviews with three different campesinos sheds light on the importance of sustainable development. Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Viva la Causa: 500 Years of Chicano HistoryGet Details Elizabeth Martinez and Doug Norberg Documentary 60 minutes 1995
With English subtitles
This widely acclaimed documentary is the only contemporary video offering a broad overview of the Mexican American experience. It is based on the popular bilingual book "500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures" by Elizabeth Martinez, noted author and lecturer.Part One depicts the pre-Columbian origins of Mexican Americans through Spanish colonization, the U.S. take-over of today's Southwest by war in 1848, the people's resistance, workers creating great wealth, and their massive strikes, up to World War II.Part Two shows the 1943 "Zoot Suit Riots" and early efforts to fight discrimination, the farmworkers movement, student protests, the Moratorium against the Vietnam war, new Chicano art, women's struggles, today's Latino issues, and joint work with other groups seeking social justice.
Sister to SisterGet Details and Purchasing Info Victoria Maldonado Documentary 20 minutes 1997
With English subtitles
Documentary on the women in Cuba. Issues concerning women or Cubans are talked about during the Hesmispheric Solidarity Women Conference.Interviews with Cubans on the effects of the U.S. embargo in society and education. Purchase Price: $ 79.95
Labor Conditions
Something to HideGet Details and Purchasing Info Documentary 25 minutes 1999
With English subtitles
Today in the global economy, corporations hide their production around the world behind locked gates, armed guards and 15-foot high concrete walls topped with razor wire. The companies refuse to release to the American people the names and locations of the factories they use. What are they trying to hide? We have the right to know where, in which country and in which factory, under what human rights conditions, and at what wages the products are made. Purchase Price: $ 79.95
Huichols & PesticidesGet Details and Purchasing Info Patricia Diaz-Romo Documentary 27 minutes 1994
With English subtitles
The indigenous Huichol people of Mexico consider themselves responsible for keeping the flames of life burning, and maintaining the forces of nature in balance. Paradoxically, as this documentary describes, they are also the primary victims of a disastrous environmental health crisis: their exposure to dangerous chemical pesticides, which are responsible for more than 1,500 deaths per year. In this film, doctors, anthropologists, and the Huichol people themselves describe this tragedy. The practitioners of subsistence agriculture for centuries, the Huichols’ insertion into a market economy has led them to work as fieldworkers for multinational agribusiness concerns based in Mexico. The film explains the pervasive use of pesticides there as an example of the exportation of environmentally and medically dangerous industries to the Third World, where low wages and lax enforcement of labor and environmental laws allow for the maximization of profits at catastrophic costs to the local population, especially for the marginalized indigenous populations, already suffering from the effects of poverty and malnutrition. In the fields, entire families labor for piecework rates exposing themselves and their children to deadly chemical pesticides without protective equipment, sufficient medical care, or sufficient education about the chemicals’ deadly effects. Not only are these fieldworkers not provided with the gloves or goggles necessary to protect themselves from these deadly poisons, they are not aware of their danger – even reusing pesticide containers to store their drinking water in and bathing their children in pesticides as a kind of mosquito repellent. These same pesticides have now supplanted traditional farming in the Huichol villages themselves, where they contaminate local water supplies. Huichols & Insecticides is a clamor for a solution to this situation. The immediate needs are for education for the Huichol themselves, better medical treatment, and more stringent regulation of pesticides and their use. But the film also offers as alternatives the growing consumer demand for pesticide-free produce, and suggests that the traditional agricultural practices of indigenous people themselves could contribute new models for sustainable agriculture to the world. Purchase Price: $ 79.95
Zoned for Slavery: the Child Behind the LabelGet Details and Purchasing Info Documentary 23 minutes 1995
With English subtitles
Meet the children who work in the sweatshops ofCentral America. See the armed guards at the factory's gate. Go inside and watch the young workers being searched to prevent them from Bringing food to work. Talk to them about the deplorable conditions: low wages, forced birth control, work quotas, long hours and compulsory overtime, denial of an education. Purchase Price: $ 79.95
Indigenous Peoples
We Are KunaGet Details and Purchasing Info Jose (Che Che) Martinez Documentary 27 minutes 1997
With English subtitles
This documentary presents the history of the Kuna Indians and their struggle for autonomy. At a yearly celebration of their independence day, residents reenact the battles that won them their freedom. Present day village life is shown and their fight against the multinational corporations that are destroying their lands is documented. Purchase Price: $ 140.00
Wichan: The TrialGet Details and Purchasing Info Magali Meneses Docudrama 27 minutes 1995
With English subtitles
A short drama set in the past tells a story of how the Mapuche dealt with wrongdoing in the community. Purchase Price: $ 79.95
Fantastic Fair, TheGet Details and Purchasing Info Igor de Gandarias/ Guillermo Escalon Documentary 18 minutes 1998
With English subtitles
Without documentary zeal the work attests, from an internal approach, the idiosyncrasy and the popular feeling of Guatemala that is exhumed freely in its fairs. It evokes the environment of the holiday exposing its psychological and social contents. It is coexistent between religious mysticism and festive pleasure, adjustment between popular culture and consumption society, magic and reality present in only one moment, expressed in the own voice of its bearings and makers. Purchase Price: $ 99.95
