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Editor's Note:
Bustling, chaotic, and irrepressibly vivacious, the cities of Latin America are home to some 78% of the region’s population. The environmental, political, economic, artistic, and everyday ramifications of this intense urbanization are explored in the films of this collection, which aim to depict both the often precarious existence and the sheer vitality of Latin America’s city-dwellers.
To order either of these videos, 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.
Havana Today: Impressions of a City in 16 Chapters Get Details and Purchasing Info
Cecilia Ricciarelli and Diego Malquori
Documentary 29 minutes 2001
With English subtitles
What is life in Havana for its residents? “An act of love.” “Laughing.” “Defiance of the profile of history.” “A mystical and spiritual city.” “You have to be creative – you have to sacrifice.” “Movement and evolution.” “Nothing is finished, and every day is faced anew.” “Neither paradise nor hell, but complexity – a peculiar, distinctive, revolutionary truth.” Daily life in this multifaceted city, crucible of history and living community, is impossible to describe in a single narrative. And so, Havana Today weaves together a love song to Havana from sixteen juxtaposed fragments that unite to make a whole. Some of the fragments touch on the fantasy and imagination of a life divided between revolutionary struggle and survival. In others, artists, intellectuals, passers-by, and old-time habaneros reveal their relationship to the city. Other fragments are composed of collages of impressionist images that speak for themselves. And still others occupy themselves with the creative process of artists trying to capture Habana’s soul, such as the legendary film director Humberto Solás, shown at work on his latest feature. With a rippling soundtrack and scores of evocative images and testimonies, Havana Today is a sketch of the beauty, struggle, hope, and love of the remarkable people of Havana, Cuba.
Purchase Price: $ 79.95
Malecon Get Details and Purchasing Info
Jan Van Bilsen and Dirk Vandersypen
documentary 25 minutes 1995
With English subtitles
This thoughtful and personal documentary focuses on the struggles and economic hardships endured in Havana in the last decade. Its protagonists are the clients of an ersatz taxi driver, who drives up and down the avenue that skirts Havana’s seawall (the “malecón”) in his own car, chauffeuring people for a fee. With the lack of gas and car parts, says one passenger, transportation is a nightmare. The car itself is more than a decade older than its driver. It is a balmy Wednesday afternoon and the malecón is packed with people. There is no work, but to make ends meet, they sell pure rum, rough moonshine, handicrafts, pizza. Some play music, others sunbathe, gossip, or dance to the radio. Prostitutes, some as young as twelve, look for a “friend.” A boy tries to jump in the door of a moving bus. The people watch as an improvised boat washes up, with 9 men crammed on top –they tried to float to Florida but the bad tides sent them back. As the police move in, a man rides by on his bike with a poodle in the front basket. These are scenes from the life of a city whose inhabitants are enduring a difficult transition – from the relative economic security they enjoyed under the socialist economy to their reality after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which they face hunger and diminished opportunities. Their reactions are varied, but the director captures their carefully worded but nonetheless sincere impressions of Cuba and its government. One woman calls Fidel a good man – but very isolated. A poet tells a joke: the government has already collapsed, but with so much bureaucracy, they just haven’t realized it yet. From bitter to brave to nonchalant, this video captures the variety of thoughts and opinions of the residents of a city caught in tough times.
Purchase Price: $ 79.95
Cuba 111 Get Details and Purchasing Info
Jan Van Bilsen and Dirk Vandersypen
documentary 52 minutes 1995
With English subtitles
111 Cuba Street is an address in the grandly dilapidated neighborhood of Old Havana. From the outside it is merely a faded blue wall and a slowly rotting oak door. But inside, it is a community, whose residents all share the same patio, the center of social life where the children play, the adults play dominoes, and the old sit and remember. But the solidarity and joy with which the neighbors live belies the daily struggles they have to manage, their tremendous stoicism and ingenuity in the face of a devastated economy. Papito struggles to support a sick child. Carlos dreams of escaping the country to support his “nation and his flag” – not Cuba but his 7-month-old son. Xiomara calls herself “a true revolutionary” and arrives early to vote in a municipal election. Standing proud despite his white beard and fading vision, Alberto calls the vote a waste of time and goes to beg money from tourists. Old Betica tries to stretch her tiny pension by selling cakes. Another neighbor waits for money from abroad, and weeps over the pictures of her two daughters in Miami. No one has enough money, and a passerby says she hasn’t bought new underwear in 2 years. The neighbors of 111 Cuba St. are a microcosm of Havana. They are in “la lucha,” the struggle to make ends meet, but their courage and dignity never flags, in a city where hardship has made the community even stronger.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
We're Still Here Get Details and Purchasing Info
Greg Berger
Documentary 30 minutes 2001
With English subtitles
A lively and highly informative look at the human mismanagement that has made Mexico City a magnet for "natural" disasters. Narrated by a wise-cracking skeleton, the video shows how millions of “chilangos” (Mexico City residents) live under the constant threat of floods, gas explosions, and disasters like the 1985 earthquake that killed more than 10,000, which loom threateningly on the Mexico City horizon like the active volcano Popocatéptl. But, as the video tells us, “the problem is not Popo, but poo-poo” – less dramatic but equally deadly problems like blocked sewage, shoddy construction, and inadequate engineering that could at any rainstorm cause avalanches in the poor neighborhoods that ring the hills surrounding the city. These latter problems are not dealt with by a government which funds high-profile programs like seismology even as it ignores the more problems that effect millions of citizens everyday. Using file footage from past disasters and interviews with scientists, anthropologists, engineers, community activists, and regular folks, the video convincingly ties the lack of effective disaster prevention to state paternalism and government demagoguery, pointing out that the most effective policies have been made by concerned community members. Instead of putting the community at the mercy of an arrogant and mismanaged government, it says, the state should make itself available to its citizens, reversing the power dynamic in the city and allowing those who know the dangers best and are affected the most to build the necessary infrastructure and awareness.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Seven Days in Once Get Details and Purchasing Info
Daniel Burman
Documentary 42 minutes 2001
With English subtitles
Rich in local flavor and colorful characters, this documentary portrays daily life in the “Once” neighborhood of Buenos Aires where Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Middle East have settled since the early twentieth century. Today, they constitute one of the largest and most important Jewish communities in Latin America. By casual conversations with some of the neighborhood’s native sons and daughters, young and old, the film provides a folk history of the neighborhood, its residents, its institutions, and the effects of the 1994 terrorist attack on the Jewish community center in its heart.At the center of Once for its residents are its institutions, and the vibrant community life that has always surrounded them. The film describes Jewish restaurants and bakeries, schools, barbershops, butchers, and shops, Yiddish theater, two Jewish newspapers, bars, and cafés where each political party had its own table and where, as one narrator explained, people “sat down to fix the world.” Although changing demographics, Argentina’s economic crisis, and physical transformation have all altered Once and its community, its defining moment, for better or for worse, may have been the deadly bombing of the Jewish mutual aid society. Without stooping to sensationalism, the reflections of the protagonists on the repercussions that followed the attack speak to some of the central issues of the community. Have Argentina’s Jews been abandoned by the state? Are Jewish institutions the same as other institutions in Argentine society? At any rate, the continuation of daily Jewish life in Once proves that, in one speaker’s words, “Time proved that they couldn’t kill us. We were hurt, but our life went on.” The survival of Jewish institutions and daily life in Once speaks to the determination of its residents to preserve a space for Jewish institutions and Jewish culture within the social space of Argentina. The film and its lively subjects present the everyday aspects of these simultaneous processes of adaptation and preservation.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Metal and Melancholy Get 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
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
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