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Editor's Note:
To order any of these tapes, contact us by email at info@lavavideo.org, by phone 212-243-4804, or by fax 212-243-2007. Our website, www.latinamericanvideo.org, allows for secure purchases by credit card.
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Daily Struggles, Urban and Rural
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Little Prince's Rap Against the Wicked Souls Get Details and Purchasing Info
Paulo Caldas, Marcelo Luna
Animation 75 minutes 2000
With English subtitles
This gritty and uncompromising film documents real life in the narrow streets and twisted alleys of a Brazilian favela (slum) outside the northeastern city of Recife. While the “wicked souls” of the neighborhoods rob and rape, the racist police are on the take and brutalize the innocent. As self-made vigilantes claim to “clean” the neighborhood of wicked souls, some mothers are left wailing over the bodies of their murdered sons and others wait on line to visit their sons in jail. Poverty begets crime, and vengeance begets murder. There are few possible responses to this brutal street violence that has become endemic to urban Brazil. This documentary shows the very different ways in which two young men survive. 21-year-old Helinho is a vigilante with 44 killings to his name. Garnizé is a 26-year-old rapper, drummer, and activist. Both are children of the silent social war that is fought daily on the streets of Brazilian cities, but their weapons are very different. The gun and microphone, the bullet and the drumbeat – the film explores their effects on each man’s community and each man’s soul. With gorgeous and dramatic cinematography, the film shows Recife in all its contradictions, and a cast of characters from a bereaved mother to the hard-bitten police chief, from a populist radio announcer to an amateur death squad. Set to the sweltering beat of Brazilian shantytown music, it examines the groundswell of the popular urban culture of a politically-aware generation of young people who use “the outcast rhythm of the outskirts to speak the truth, no matter how painful, to whoever will listen.” This film aims to capture the truth of the real conditions of the people of contemporary Brazil.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Port-au-Prince Is Mine Get Details and Purchasing Info
Rigoberto Lopez
Documentary 57 minutes 2000
With English subtitles
Proud midwife of revolution, tropical chaos, cradle of Afro-Caribbean culture, and environmental disaster, Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti is a complex and multifaceted city. This film portrays the city in all its complexity, using interviews with intellectuals, officials, and ordinary people, scenes from the city’s vibrant street life, grandly dilapidated architecture, and stories of the crises engendered by Port-Au-Prince’s population explosion. Founded in 1749, the city soon had 10 thousand inhabitants. By the end of the 19th century, it had 60,000. Although it was the capital, Port-Au-Prince was still a bit of a sleepy small town – the southern city of Jacmel had electricity before Port-Au-Prince. Emerging from a long U.S. occupation, the city was at its artistic zenith as a center for Afro-Caribbean aesthetic culture in the 1950s. But the rise of the Duvalier dictatorship and the subsequent lack of investment in the countryside brought waves of peasant migration into the city, and the population exploded from 150,000 to a staggering 2.5 million within a period of 50 years. Many of the new residents recreated vibrant Haitian peasant culture amidst the drab backdrop of hastily constructed shantytowns. The rapid proliferation of these neighborhoods, and the flight of the elite further and further up the mountains surrounding the city has led to an environmental crisis of disastrous proportions for Port-Au-Prince residents already subject to poverty, unemployment, lack of education, health problems, street crime, and political uncertainty. PORT-AU-PRINCE IS MINE depicts the daily life of ordinary residents of this beleaguered city in all its complex melancholy, uncertainty, and optimism. While some people are resigned, others have responded with hard work, creativity, stoicism, and hope for the future. The site of the world’s first free black republic, the stories of Haiti and Port-au-Prince are the stories of a dream stillborn, but through which the ingenuity and cultural integrity of the Haitian people have always found a way to survive.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Scenes of Resistance Get Details and Purchasing Info
Alejandra Navarro Smith
Documentary 24 minutes 2001
With English subtitles
Away from the headlines, Zapatista villagers strive for self-sufficiency in a country whose government routinely ignores the rights and concerns of its indigenous population. In a series of meditations on daily life, this quietly powerful film conveys the way the revolution is fought in the cornfields, the kitchens, and the school of a rebel village in Chiapas, Mexico.
Purchase Price: $ 79.95
Bitter Memories Get Details and Purchasing Info
Nefertiti Kelley Farias and Carlos Bazua Morales
Documentary 30 minutes 2000
With English subtitles
Bitter Memories collects the tragic testimonies from survivors of two of the many massacres committed by the Guatemalan military in the rural areas of the country in the early 1980s. This video, an important contemporary document of the tragic and historic moment when the survivors participate in the exhumations of the victims of the 1982 massacres graves in northern Huehuetenango, Guatemala, and the Mayan ceremonies that took place in honor of the dead. As the bodies are excavated and mourned, so too is the tragic history of this troubled nation.
Purchase Price: $ 79.95
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Celebrating Traditional Music
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Virtuosos Get Details and Purchasing Info
Luis Armando Roche
Documentary 53 minutes 2000
With English subtitles
This film discusses the rich and vibrant tradition of Venezuelan folkloric music. Far from treating the music as rudimentary or its protagonists as anonymous, VIRTUOSOS illustrates the diversity and complexity of this technically-demanding music by highlighting the individual contributions of four seminal Venezuelan musicians. Fredy Reyna and Jacinto Perez, now deceased, were exponents of a small guitar-like instrument called the cuatro. Reyna was a cosmopolitan musician who brought a panoply of influences to the humble cuatro, from the ornamented sophistication of the classical and baroque guitar repertoires to the arabesques of Spanish flamenco. Perez was a self-taught musician from the lower classes who was a pillar of tradition even as he revolutionized the instrument through his virtuosic technical innovations and his fiery off-the-cuff improvisations. In the words of one observer in the film, there is no contemporary cuatro-player who plays outside the shadow of their enormous contributions. Anselmo Lopez plays the bandola, an instrument that would probably no longer exist without him. A descendent of an archaic Spanish stringed instrument called the bandurria, the bandola was seen as an anachronism until Lopez erupted on the scene, bandola in hand. His astonishing improvisations demonstrated the musical possibilities of this instrument and single-handedly rescued it from obscurity. Fulgencio Aquino and Ignacio “Indio” Figueredo were both harpists. Aquino, a master improviser, used his expansive repertoire and penchant for subtle ornamentation to weave together patterns of breathtaking complexity. Figueredo was a prodigy who learned to play in only 5 days. After injuring his hand, he taught himself to play with only 7 fingers, refiguring the way counterpoint was executed and foreverchanging the sound of the Venezuelan harp. His legacy also includes a sizable body of original compositions. Alternating between the accounts of contemporary musicians speaking about their heroes and archival concert footage of the musicians themselves, VIRTUOSOS features the driving rhythms and shimmering textures of Venezuelan rhythms like joropo and merengue venezolano. Its use of contemporary artists, composers, and musicologists to comment on the meaning behind the music and the significance of its major exponents makes VIRTUOSOS an excellent introduction into the power and beauty of this rich and moving cultural expression.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
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