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Other Road, The Get Details and Purchasing Info
Oscar Orzabal Quintana
Feature 90 minutes 1959
With English subtitles
This lost Puerto Rican classic is a black-and-white musical melodrama from the golden years of Latin American cinema. The action unfolds in the picturesque setting of a mountain coffee plantation at harvest time, where a young Puerto Rican Hamlet must deal with his widowed mother’s blooming love for a handsome stranger who appears one day to change their lives forever. Embittered by the drunken foreman and his dead father’s jealous mother, he resolves not to let the man stay, even as the stranger’s nobility and hard work endear him to his mother and the farmworkers. The film was one of the few major productions of the tiny Puerto Rican film industry. Tragically, this important document was lost soon after its premier. Found years later rotting on the banks of a river, it has been painstakingly restored and is available to the public for the first time in 40 years. Set in the idyllic Puerto Rican countryside and featuring rare footage of folkloric peasant music, The Other Road is a rare glimpse into the bucolic country life of the Puerto Rican past.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
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New Latin American Cinema
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Throw a Dime Get Details and Purchasing Info
Fernando Birri
Documentary 33 minutes 1958
With English subtitles
Throw a Dime (Tire dié) was a major watershed for the New Latin American Cinema, the source of a renovating movement that some years later spread throughout Latin America. With a new documentary style, the film focused on the underveloped suburbs of a city, Santa Fe, Argentina. Birri and his crew succeeded in filming a moving document about extreme poverty, and the main protagonists were children with no future. One of its main sequences — in which children run barefoot beside a train and along a very narrow and dangerous bridge begging for a dime (“tire dié”) — is one of the most memorable scenes in the visual memory of the XXth Century.— Jorge Ruffinelli, Stanford University
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Flooded, The Get Details and Purchasing Info
Fernando Birri
Feature 87 minutes 1961
With English subtitles
The Flooded (Los inundados) was Birri’s first feature film, made with an unheard of mix of professional and natural actors and also with a very noticeable taste for social documentary — it was shot during the flooding devastation of an underdeveloped area in Argentina. It shows great narrative skills and a very human, warm sense of picaresque humor centered on its humble characters. A whole family (including the dog) loses their home and takes provisional refuge in an empty stockcar. A new odyssey starts for the occupants when (by chance?) the locomotive is coupled to the stockcar, dragging it towards an uncertain destiny. A satirical tone is used to depict the hypocrisy of politicians, and a different one to show the main characters's resilience and ingenuity for surviving. Four decades after it was filmed, “Los inundados” keeps intact its freshness, enthusiasm, and fighting spirit for social justice that were the film’s inspirational strength.—Jorge Ruffinelli, Stanford University
Purchase Price: $ 150.00
Brickmakers, The Get Details and Purchasing Info
Marta Rodriguez and Jorge Silva
Documentary 42 minutes 1972
With English subtitles
This meticulously shot and edited film, 6 years in the making, documents the squalid life of a Colombian family in the grips of poverty and exploitation. The Castañedas - father, mother, and all of their 12 children over the age of 3 - spend their days digging in the mud and hauling bricks to a toxin-belching kiln. The depth of knowledge and the intimacy of the footage reflect the years the filmmakers shared with the Castañedas, and its origins in the filmmakers’ anthropological studies allows it to shed light on such diverse issues as the economic structure of the family’s exploitation, the process of making the bricks, and the family’s political and religious beliefs.But the film departs from the flat documentary style as its weaves together voices that exemplify the forces of technological change, domestic and political violence, and sheer spiritual and material need that envelop the Castañeda family. The poignancy and urgency of the gorgeously shot black-and-white images are a timeless exploration of the tragedy of economic exploitation and the fragility of the human spirit.
Purchase Price: $ 250.00
Charcoal Worker, The Get Details and Purchasing Info
Julio Garcia Espinosa
Documentary 20 minutes 1954
With English subtitles
This film depicts the lives of the mégano, peasants in the southern coastal region of Cuba who extract minerals from tree trunks to produce charcoal for the landowners. This is one of the first pre-revolutionary films to star common people (not professional actors) and portray the harsh lives of the rural poor. Every day, the men, women, and children of the family spend their days in the swamp, immersed in water up to their chests, prying tree trunks from the river’s muddy bottom. Despite the wrenching poverty in which they live, the méganos have a stoic dignity and a love of family and of their culture and traditional music. In the film, they also have a consciousness of their abject situation. They see the luxury in which the gringo tourists and their landlord live. This landlord controls everything –setting the prices of the charcoal, and charging them for their equipment and rent, and it is he who keeps the accounts for the illiterate peasants. “This can’t go on like this!” says the head of the family. But torn between exploitation and the need to feed their wives and children, they have no choice. When a fire destroys their charcoal oven, the head of the family resolves to continue on. Shot in gorgeous black and white, this film was confiscated by the pre-revolutionary president but prefigured the films made under the Castro regime.
Purchase Price: $ 79.95
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The Work of Santiago Alvarez
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Ciclon Get Details and Purchasing Info
Santiago Alvarez
Documentary 25 minutes 1963
No English subtitles
In October 1963, Hurricane Flora ravaged the provinces of Camagüey and Oriente in Western Cuba. In this early work, Santiago Alvarez and his small film crew document the catastrophe with gripping footage of the destruction left in Flora’s wake. But he also portrays the government’s relief operations, and the work of the people to bury their dead, reclaim their lives, and move on. In this early work, Álvarez uses a more direct documentary style than the one he would become known for, but touches of his experimental ethos and eye for drama anticipate the creative innovations that would characterize his career.
Purchase Price: $ 49.95
Now! Get Details and Purchasing Info
Santiago Alvarez
Documentary 6 minutes 1965
With English subtitles
Lena Horne’s famous song “Now!”, which was banned in the U.S. in the 1960s, was an angry call for struggle against racism. This film uses Horne’s song as the vehicle for a montage of film and photographic images from the U.S. civil rights movement. These images of racial struggle and oppression in the United States convey the heroism and pathos of the black protagonists of the Civil Rights movement, and the brutality of white police and Klansmen and the system they represent. Santiago Álvarez responds to the song’s escalating rhythm by moving between images to evoke the violence with which American society was being torn apart by white supremacy, and the intensity of the African-American struggle to right these injustices.
Purchase Price: $ 49.95
Forward to Victory Get Details and Purchasing Info
Santiago Alvarez
Documentary 19 minutes 1967
With English subtitles
This film celebrates the life and revolutionary commitment of an important figure in the Cuban Revolution, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The film was completed in less than 48 hours for a public memorial after Guevara was killed fighting for socialist revolution in Bolivia. Nonetheless, it is a lasting testament to the memory of Guevara and the intensity of his belief in political change. Featuring evocative images of the Bolivian peasants he died fighting for, and the Bolivian army and U.S. corporations he fought against, the film also contains extended footage of Guevara as an orator. In one of his speeches, Guevara, a man so ineradicably linked to the history of Cuba, explains the necessity of risking one’s life to battling imperialism throughout the third world - tragically prefiguring his own death in Bolivia.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Hanoi, Martes 13 Get Details and Purchasing Info
Santiago Alvarez
Documentary 38 minutes 1967
No English subtitles
Filmed in Hanoi at the height of the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, this documentary depicts the dignity, diligence, and fortitude of a people at war. It employs extensive footage, filmed before, during, and after the devastating bombing of Hanoi on December 13, 1966, despite both technical limitations and the very real danger of the indiscriminate bombing of the city. Using a montage of traditional Vietnamese images, the film portrays the depth of Vietnamese culture and their centuries of struggle against occupation by the Chinese, Cambodians, Siamese, and French. The film continues using gorgeous impressionist film of the Vietnamese people - men, women and children smiling shyly at the camera, cooking, eating, weaving, fishing, and especially working. As American planes appear, they drop their ploughs and run for their antiaircraft guns. The idyllic images end as the streets empty and the people hide, emerging later to find their homes destroyed and their children wounded and dead. Yet, the film suggests that their tragedy also inspires them to continue to fight, to turn, as the film states, “hate into energy.”
Purchase Price: $ 79.95
L.B.J. Get Details and Purchasing Info
Santiago Alvarez
Documentary 17 minutes 1968
With English subtitles
A bitterly mocking portrayal of the then-U.S. President, LBJ is the ultimate example of a political propaganda film. Santiago Álvarez’s breathtakingly agile montage cuts between deeply suggestive images to create an accumulated sense of horror and revulsion to Johnson, the government he represented, and the “cowboy” image he embodied - even intimating that Johnson ascended to power from the deaths of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers. Using hard-hitting images from the civil rights movement, the Kennedy assassinations, and the luxurious wedding of Johnson’s daugher, LBJ constructs a narrative of deep psychological impact.
Purchase Price: $ 79.95
79 Springtimes Get Details and Purchasing Info
Santiago Alvarez
Documentary 24 minutes 1969
No English subtitles
This film memorializes the leader of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, on the occasion of his death. It narrates the story of a life which is also the story of a nation – recounting his important accomplishments in the struggle against colonialism and imperialism. The simplicity of his ascetic life of study, work, and struggle is contrasted to the pomp of his official funeral, where the film documents the immense outpouring of grief by the Vietnamese people on the death of their leader. The film’s most impacting sequence is its outcry against the Vietnam War, where scenes of anti-war protests in the U.S. and battle scenes give way to disturbing images of mutilated Vietnamese children. This famous section comments on violence by not merely portraying it, but by brutalizing the strips of film themselves, bringing the full force of the horrors of war to the screen in a technique which, in characteristically Santiago Álvarez style, is both highly formalist and emotionally persuasive.
Purchase Price: $ 79.95
Odd Number, The Get Details and Purchasing Info
Manuel Antin
Feature 90 minutes 1960
With English subtitles
The Odd Number is one of the best-known films of legendary Argentine filmmaker Manuel Antín. Antín is known for his inspiration in literature and his emotionally taut portrayals of tormented internal struggle. His thought-provoking films have been widely influential in his native country – in an epoch when Latin American filmmakers dealt with their nations’ marginality, Antín strove to unearth deeply human universals. The Odd Number is a moody exploration of complex ties of love and jealousy. The film is an adaptation of a story by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, in which a mother writes her son and his wife in Paris that they will soon receive a visit from his brother … his dead brother. The past slowly unfolds as the film brilliantly weaves together narrative strands from the past and the present to reveal a psychological terrain full of deceit, sexual envy, guilt, and death in the relationship between the two brothers, the wife, and the mother. Both the mother in Argentina and the couple in France slowly succumb to madness and obsession as haunting memories infiltrate the meaningless routine of their lives. Shot in brooding black-and-white in Buenos Aires and Paris and scored to a brittle modernist soundtrack, the film is a masterful existential drama about the persistence of ghosts in the gaps between the unsaid and the revealed.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
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