Editor's Note:
Below are the most recent documentary releases from the Latin American Video Archives (LAVA). LAVA has been funded by the Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundations to provide academics, programmers and librarians with a centralized internet resource to locate and purchase Latin American film/video titles. Our website, www.latinamericanvideo.org, combines the collections of all US distributors that handle Latin American titles (now more than 7,000 titles), provides a free tape search service, and is updated daily. Contact us at 124 Washington Place, NY, NY 10014, phone 212-243-4804, fax 212-243-2007, email: info@lavavideo.org.

MEXICO

I Forgot, I Don't Remember (a.k.a. Juan, I Don't Remember)   Get Details and Purchasing Info
Juan Carlos Rulfo
Documentary   75 minutes   1998
With English subtitles
This potent Mexican film deals with the distressing but inescapable human characteristic of memory loss. Filmmaker Juan Carlos Rulfo is searching for his father, and on his investigative journey he encounters numerous people who remember the man by name. Sadly, however, they cannot remember anything else about him.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95


Zapatista   Get Details
Benjamin Eichert, Richard Rowley, Stale Sandberg
Documentary   55 minutes   1998
With English subtitles
Zapatista is an inspiring first hand account of a struggle that will challenge the way you think about the world. Armed with sticks and words against a "First World" military, eight thousand Zapatistas have used poems and children's stories smuggled on horseback and distributed on the internet, to permanently transform the political imagination of a nation. Zapatista offers us a new way of thinking about political struggle and about what it means to live as a human being. Summer, 1996: Three students from the United States and Europe hear something so new and powerful in the Zapatistas' message that they realize they have to go to Chiapas. Armed only with a few pesos and two state-of-the-art digital video cameras, they make their way deep into the Lacandon. Their energy and their lightwieght, inconspicuous equipment get them into places where others can not go. Inside rebel territory they meet with Dominican Priests and Mayan elders, with peasant soldiers and warrior poets. Their journey culminates in a rare, late night meeting with Subcomandante Marcos, the elusive spokesperson for the movement, from a Zapatista stronghold high in the mountains.June, 1998: Two trips to Chiapas later Big Noise films premieres its hour-long documentary, ZAPATISTA, to a standing-room-only crowd of over 1000 in Santa Barbara. Edited and designed by the Media Boutique using the latest non-linear technology, it is an inspiring first hand account of a struggle that will challenge the way you think about the world. Combining the raw intensity of footage from the front-lines with a hip digital aesthetic, ZAPATISTA pushes documentary style and form to its limits. A cast of rebel leaders, celebrity narrators, and political activists are woven together with high-impact music and footage. Together they reveal the heart of this ancient resistance and its relationship to today's global economy -- and to us all.

US/Latino

Black & Gold   Get Details
Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen
Documentary   76 minutes   1999
With English subtitles
A digital video documentary that tells the story of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation. The product of over one year of filming on the front lines of New York City, BLACK&GOLD combines the testimony of Kings and Queens with a fast-paced stream of images and hip-hop beats that capture the texture of their struggle and of the urban landscape in which it takes place.The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation is a street nation of Latino Youth in New York City. The Nation's story begins in Chicago in the 1940s when the Latin Kings formed as a Latino self-defence group. Like the Black Panthers, the Young Lords and so many other groups that struggle for political empowerment, the Latin Kings were broken as a movement.They lost touch with their roots and grew into one of the largest and most infamous criminal gangs in America.In 1994, in the face of an increasingly racist political culture and an escalation in police violence, the New York Latin Kings became the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation. The Kings and Queens realized that they had become part of the problem in their communities; that they were playing out roles scripted for them by a racist social and economic structure. The Nation broke with its criminal past and transformed into a grass-roots political group working in the poor Latino sections of New York.

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