|
= Lame, Crummy.
= OK, Watchable.
= Good.
= Very Good.
= Great, Classic.
|
LOS AFINCAOS
|
Two brothers in a remote Indian town are in love with the same girl, a new teacher who
has been assigned to the town. The older brother is a brute and attempts to rape the girl,
causing enmity with the younger brother. This was the only film made by the famous
Teatro del Pueblo. The acting is stagy and the cinematography often crude, but the story
is compelling.
Based on the 1940 play Los afincaos: drama barbaro by Enzo Aloisi (an Italian
immigrant) and Bernardo González Arrilli.
Sinopsis en español:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
EL CAMINO (The Road)
|
Manuel, a sheltered young man from Buenos Aires, treks across Patagonia on his
motorcycle in search of the father he never met. On the way, a barroom
brawl lands him in jail, where he witnesses a cop beating another
prisoner. He escapes and continues his journey to Neuquen, while the corrupt
cop chases him. Arriving in Neuquen, Manuel finds that his father is
an anthropologist helping the Mapuche Indians to preserve their culture.
His father's friend Casimino (Rubén Patagonia) helps Manuel to foil the
corrupt cop and persuades him to stop running and report the crime to the
police. The plot is similar to another Argentine film, the wonderful
Fuga de cerebros, but unfortunately El Camino
is improbable, unfocused, and mediocre.
Sinopsis en español: |
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
LA DEUDA INTERNA (The Inner Debt) [a.k.a. Veronico Cruz]
|
A teacher (Juan José Camero) is assigned to Chorcán, a poor mountain village in Jujuy,
in northwestern Argentina, inhabited by Qollas. There he befriends Veronico Cruz
(Gonzalo Morales), a boy who
has lost his parents. When the grandmother dies, the boy moves
in with the teacher, who inspires him with knowledge of the
world outside the village, particularly the sea. Stark images and sparse
dialogue convey the bleak poverty of life in the village and the growing
hints, alternately alluring and frightening, of a bigger world outside,
including the military coup of 1976. Indigenous music with flutes and
charangos greatly enhances this subtle, restrained, poetic and haunting
film, the first from director Miguel Pereira. Based on true stories told
by the musician, poet, and teacher Fortunato Ramos (who
plays a small part in the film as Veronico's father).
La deuda interna won awards in Argentina, Colombia, and Germany.
A note on the title: The film is also known by the title La dueda interna, which may be an allusion to an Argentine movie released a year before this one, El hombre de la deuda externa, about a man who wins a fortune and uses it to pay Argentina's foreign debt. So La deuda interna may refer to the cost of human lives that Argentina owes to its people for the war of the Islas Malvinas.
Sinopsis en español: |
||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
EL DESTINO (The Man Who Came to a Village)
|
Inspired by the novel El hombre que llegó a un pueblo [The Man Who Came to a Village] by Héctor Tizón.
A drug dealer from Spain goes to a small town in Jujuy disguised as a priest. When the deal goes wrong he is
injured and left for dead. The townspeople find him and restore him to health, thinking he really is a priest.
Continuing the deceit, he guides the town in deciding whether to continue their tradition as potters and
craftsmen or work for a development company building a road through town. He decides in favor of the road, but
then changes his mind when he discovers that the road will cut through and destroy the cemetery, where he has
heard there is a buried treasure he was planning to steal. As in his earlier film La ultima siembra,
master filmmaker Miguel Pereira weaves a complex tale that explores the threat of modernity and development to
traditional ways, using his usual techniques of beautiful cinematography, subtle symbolism, and a compelling story
of conflicting motivations.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
FUGA DE LA PATAGONIA
(Escape from Patagonia)
|
Based on an episode in the life of the Buenos Aires naturalist and explorer Francisco "Perito" Moreno (May 31, 1852 - November 22, 1919).
During his second exploration of Patagonia, Moreno and his Mapudungun translator Gavino were captured by the Tehuelche. At the
time, Argentina was carrying out its notorious Campaña del Desierto or Conquest of the Desert, setting up military bases throughout
Patagonia. The Tehuelches captured Moreno and condemned him to death. This film dramatizes his escape. During an earlier expedition
Moreno had befriended Francisco Sayhueque (played by Gustavo Rodríguez), son of the chief. Francisco opposes the condemnation of Moreno
but nevertheless follows the orders to capture him. Moreno eventually escapes, and a few years later, outside the scope of the film, he
founded the Museo de La Plata. In 1886 Moreno negotiated for the return of Tehuelche prisoners, whom he then kept in his museum and
living exhibitions. Fuga a la Patagonia is a well-made suspense film in the tradition of Argentine westerns (gauchos), and has some beautiful scenery. But it is hard to overlook the film's half-hearted acknowledgement of the dark side of Moreno's controversial legacy.
Official website: ponchocine.com.ar/largometrajes/fuga-de-la-patagonia/
Sinopsis en español:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
GERÓNIMA
|
Gerónima Sande, a Mapuche woman, lives with her four children in a
one-room shack in the nearly deserted town of Trapalco, Provincia El Cuy, in the wilderness of
Patagonia where the wind never stops howling. The oldest son
occasionally catches an armadillo for them to eat, and they also live
by the graces of the trading post. The film shows the lingering devastation
wrought by the Argentine government's Campaña del Desierto of the 1880s,
which forced the Mapuches out of their fertile land in the south and into
the most inhospitable regions of Patagonia. You can't tell
what century it is until a car appears halfway through the film. One day,
the oldest son catches a large bird (a rhea?) on a neighbor's property, and the neighbor calls
the authorities. When the police see the family's extreme poverty, Geronima is taken to a mental hospital,
and the children are also
examined. The doctors debate about what to do with the family living "like
animals" and they interrogate her about her religion and customs to evaluate
her sanity. Finally, they decide to release the family,
and they go back to their squalor. Slow-paced, bleak, harrowing, the
film occasionally brings to mind One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next.
Mapuche actress Luisa Calcumil prepared for the role by not showering for
six months. Based on actual events related in the book Geronima,
by Dr. Jorge Pellegrini, published the same year. I have only seen Geronima on a very blurry
VHS. The film was restored and digitized circa 2014.
Sinopsis en español:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
HOMBRES DE BARRO (Men of Clay)
|
A group of filmmakers travel to a Qolla community
in Salta to film their folkways. We see all aspects of their life: farming,
herding, cooking, football, and making music during a Pachamama festival.
In the course of filming, the leader of the Qolla community changes the
filmmakers' view of what the documentary
should be, and at the end of their visit they are changed. "La vida se puede ir amasando, como
el barro": As life goes along, it becomes more pliant, like clay.
An announcement at the beginning of the film states that this is neither
fiction nor documentary, but I'd say it's closer to documentary. Only in
the last half-hour of the film does it start to feel like fiction, when
one of the men in the community travels with the filmmakers to the city
to look for his son, whom he has not seen since he left to find a job.
The urban scenes show people preparing for a parade for the "Mascara de la
Conquista", wearing elaborate samba-like costumes far different from
their Andean traditions. You can
find reviews of Hombres de barro at the
Miguel Mirra Blogspot. Warning: this film shows a sheep getting its
throat cut, which some viewers might find disturbing (about 45 minutes in).
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
HORIZONTES DE PIEDRA (Stone Horizons)
|
In Cerro Bayo, a mountainous region of Patagonia on the Chilean border,
a Qolla Indian falls in love with a girl from another village. His mother
disapproves of the relationship and hates the woman. When the girl becomes
pregnant with his baby, he must travel to find better work, leaving her
alone with the mother's wrath. Based
on the 1943 novel Cerro Bayo : Vidas y costumbres montañesas by
Atahualpa Yupanqui, the film is
also richly embellished with the guitar maestro's soulful folk music.
The excellent cinematography conveys the desolation of the pampa, but
also warmly captures the Qolla people singing, dancing and farming.
The film seems to validate the Inca saying, "El hombre es tierra que anda":
Man is earth that walks.
Sinopsis en español: |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
EL LARGO VIAJE DE NAHUEL PAN (The Long Journey of Nahuel Pan)
|
When a Mapuche community is displaced from their land by authorities, one of their members,
Nahuel Pan (Fabián Gianola), decides to confront the president of Argentina and tell
him about his people's problems. On the bus to Buenos Aires he meets Fernando (Alberto
Segado), a gay businessman, who
invites Nahuel to his home. Fernando's dissolute lifestyle of costume parties and heavy
drinking begins to seem more and more empty and frivolous as he identifies with Nahuel's
quest to overcome beaurocracy and indifference. Occasionally funny and ultimately
heartbreaking.
Sinopsis en español:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
MALAMBO
|
Based on a quechua legend, Malambo tells the story of a woman who
lost her husband and son because of the greedy patrón of an hacienda. She
swore that she would never remove the cloth over her eyes until her dead
were avenged by the deaths of the patrón and his daughter. Nature seems to
be on her side, since a drought has afflicted the land. Her other son,
Malambo, accepts the duty of revenge. Malambo (Oscar Valicelli) is no
normal human: he is the runa-uturungo, or Hombre Tigre, of Quechua
lore, and he cannot be wounded by bullets. He leads the obreros to rise
in revolt and defeats the patrón. However, instead of killing the patrón's
daughter--the blind Urpila (Delia Garcés)--he falls in love with her, thereby
breaking his mother's heart. Malambo follows in the path of other
Argentinan labor revolt films such as Prisioneros de la tierra and
Las aguas bajan turbias. The video released by Blakman, has
poor video and sound quality, like most Blakman releases.
Sinopsis en español:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
MASCARA DE LA CONQUISTA
|
The film tells two parallel stories. One, set in the present, tells of a pagent about the
conquest of America, while the other, set in the 15th century, tells of a group of
conquistadors coming ashore searching for gold. The film takes place in an unnamed
country, but it is listed here since Mirra's other film, Hombres de barro, is
also on this page. You can see a film clip on Mirra's blogspot at
http://mirraconquista.blogspot.com/
Sinopsis en español:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
MI HIJO CEFERINO NAMUNCURÁ [Alternate title: Ceferino Indio Santo]
|
Biopic of Ceferino Namuncurá (1886-1905), son of a Mapuche cacique and a white woman, and
the first Indian of South America to be beatified. The film starts out as a war movie,
showing his father Manuel battling the Spanish and taking a white woman as his captive bride.
But little of interest happens after Ceferino is born. His beatification relies partly
on his "miraculous" survival after falling in a stream as a baby, but the film does not
present this with any great drama, and plods through the rest of the boy's life with
similar tepor. Ceferino does well in school, attracts the interest of a priest, attends a
Catholic school in Buenos Aires, and studies for the priesthood in Italy, where he dies of
tuberculosis after a few unconvincing coughs. The only really interesting part of the
movie is the tension between the father's warrior ethic and the boy's pious pacifism. [Shown below is a photo of the historical Ceferino.]
Sinopsis en español:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
LA NACIÓN OCULTA
|
Ñaalec (Fabián Valdez) is a Moqoit college student disenchanted with formal ways of learning and embarrassed by his
drunken classmates. He seeks to recover his people's culture by learning from elders who still remember the old ways.
Ñaalec travels to the Nanaicalo Nqote ("eye of the dragon"), a sacred lake whose water gave people the power of the gods.
This docudrama is part of a series of community-created films supported
by CEFREC (led by Iván Sanjinés, son of legendary Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés). Other films in the series are
El grito de la selva and Sirionó, both made in Bolivia.
Sinopsis en español:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
LA NAVE DE LOS LOCOS (The Ship of Madmen)
|
When Pilkumán, cacique of the local Mapuche community, sees that machines
are beginning to dig up their ancestral burial grounds, he sets fire to
the hotel that has begun developing there. The hotel owner's son dies in
the fire, and Pilkumán is arrested. Pilkumán (played by Mario Lorca) refuses
to explain his actions, but the female lawyer who chooses to
defend him learns that the cacique acted in accordance with Caleuche, the
mythic ship of souls, which appeared to him and inspired his act. Despite
the interesting premise, the film devolves into a run-of-the-mill
courtroom drama that never really taps into its mythic material. Luisa
Calcumil of Geronima finally returns to the screen to play the
chamán in this film.
Sinopsis en español:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
LA PATOTA (Paulina)
|
La Patota is a remake of a black and white 1960 melodrama that took place in a poor neighborhood of Buenos Aires (patota
means street gang in Buenos Aires slang). The remake moves the the story to a small rural town near the Brasilian border, where a
liberal non-profit organization has founded a school to educate indigenous youth. Paulina, the daughter of a prominent judge, steps away
from a promising law career to teach civics in the new school. Within days she is raped a group of youths, some of whom turn out to be
her students. Paulina seems bent on denying the severity, or even the reality, of the incident. She returns to the school to teach,
and when she learns the identity of the oldest rapist, she declines to press charges. When she learns she is pregnant, she decides not
to have an abortion. Her incomprehensible behavior exasperbates her father, her boyfriend, her co-teachers at the school, and is ultimately
unexplained in the film. This will be hard to watch for many. But the acting is excellent, especially the powerful performance by Dolores
Fonzi as Paulina. Paulina is the U.S. title.
facebook.com/LaPatotaFilm Available on Youtube: youtu.be/bxa8WlArqpk
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
LA PELÍCULA DEL REY (A King and his Movie)
|
Orélie-Antoine de Tounens was a French lawyer who, while traveling through
Argentina in 1860, sympathized with the Mapuche Indians and used his legal
expertise to defend them against the invading governments of Argentina
and Chile. Declaring himself king of Patagonia and Araucania, Tounens
united the various Mapuche tribes, created a flag, and even minted coins.
Unfortunately Tounens was captured, declared insane,
and sent back to France. Cut to the 20th century: a filmmaker (played by
Julio Chávez), fascinated with the story of Tounens, decides to
make a film about it against all odds. He suffers a series of mishaps,
including the desertion of the producer, actors, and crew, legal tangles,
financial woes, union problems, and anything else that can go wrong with
making a film. Enduring it all and never giving up, Arturo begins to seem as
mad and Quixotic as the King of Patagonia himself. But as we watch him bring
his film to completion with ingenious improvisations devised to overcome
obstacles, we come to appreciate the bond between madness and
the creative drive. This is a delightful film, although as the scenes of
the film-within-a-film get better and better, it leaves us hungry to see
that epic movie Arturo makes.
Sinopsis en español: |
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
SHUNKO
|
Based on the 1949 novel Shunko by Jorge W. Abalos (1915-1979). A
teacher comes to a remote Quichua settlement to introduce reading and
writing to the children. The education turns out to be mutual, as the
teacher learns much about their culture and how it sustains them in their
primitive, arduous lives. When he gives a scientific explanation of an
eclipse, the children find his story unsatisfactory, and bring him to an
old woman who tells the story of how the sun and moon were in love.
The film features child actors with no prior experience, most of whom
had never even seen a movie before, let alone acted in one. Their naturalistic
performances free the film from cuteness or sentimentality. The story
culminates when the children are invited to a gathering of schools and a
fight breaks out between the ragged campesinos and the well-dressed
pupils from the wealthier schools. At 72 minutes, Shunko leaves
out many scenes from the book that could have been included, leaving the
viewer wishing for more. UNESCO chose Shunko as the most important
film in Argentine history. This film is similar to Veronico Cruz,
but the emphasis in Shunko is not on the titular character (played
by Angel Greco) but on the community as a whole.
Sinopsis en español: |
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
LA ÚLTIMA SIEMBRA (The Last Harvest)
|
After his son dies in a mining accident, a Qolla Indian named Chauqui
(Patricio Contreras) leaves the mine and finds work on an hacienda,
raising corn. The hacendero is kind and gives Chauqui his own plot of land,
but Chauqui is harassed by another worker, an arrogant, drunken gaucho.
The gaucho's illegitimate son José (played by Gonzalo Morales, who starred
in the director's first film Veronico Cruz) befriends Chauqui.
One day the hacendero's son Patricio returns from
college in the U.S. to introduce modern farming and business practices.
When the hacendero is injured in a riding accident, Patricio takes over
management of the hacienda, and he orders
Chauqui to clear the cornfield in a week. When he returns to find the
cornfield still standing and Chauqui hungover, they fight, and Patricio
has him arrested. Chronicling the rapid social changes of the 20th
century through a gripping family saga, La Ultima siembra is
reminiscent of William Faulkner's great novels. Based on the 1967
short story collection Los Humildes, by Miguel Pereira, the
director's father. (If you like La ultima siembra, you might
also like the Mexican film Casta Divina, another complex story of illegitimate relationships on a plantation.)
Sinopsis en español:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
EL ÚLTIMO MALÓN (The Last Uprising)
|
Silent film depicting an uprising of 900 Mocoví Indians in San Javier, a
town in the Santa Fe province of Argentina on April 21, 1904. Much of the
first is like a documentary, showing the Mocovíes' lifestyle: they hunt
birds (guacamayas, tuyangos, ostriches), and a small alligator called
yacaré; they imbibe an alcoholic drink called latagá, and they participate
in dances and in a parade to the patron saint Javier. After the anthropological
sequence, we see the events leading up to the rebellion. The old corrupt
cacique Bernardo López has been given land by the gringos and lives a life
of comfort with his young companion, the mestiza Rosa Paiquí (played by Rosa Volpe).
He becomes jealous when, at a dance, he sees Rosa dancing with his bastard
brother, Jesús Salvador López. He banishes Rosa to an island. Salvador
leads a rebellion against the rich gringos, but the rebellion is not
successful. He rescues Rosa from the island and they ride off together
on a horse, while the Mocovíes flee to Gran Chaco. For its uniqueness and
antiquity (it is one of the oldest surviving Argentine films), El
último malón is a fascinating document, but probably not a great film in
its own right. It works
like a children's picture book, with both text and images superfluously
describing each action, rather than using just a minimum of text to
explain what the images cannot convey. Writer-director Alcides Greca
(1889-1956), whose father emigrated from Germany, was born in San
Javier and became a writer and lawyer. One of the slain Indians found
after the revolt had been a servant in his house, with whom he had been
close as a boy. Many of the actors he used in the film, both white and
Mocovi, had taken part in the revolt. Greca later wrote a novel, Viento
norte: novela del norte santafecino (1927), which included a chapter
on the 1904 uprising.
Sinopsis en español:
"El hecho histórico está, y es que a los indios los hicieron mierda," dice Fernando Martín Peña, acerca de una situación sobre la que la película no deja lugar a dudas. “Y el punto de vista desde el cual se presenta al indio es coherente: la derrota del malón tiene que ver con las divisiones internas de los indios. Mientras que la ciudad está toda junta esperándolos, y hasta se muestra el falseo de la información que el hombre blanco recibe sobre el indio: a Rosario llega la noticia de que se acercan en hordas tremendas. El hombre blanco es visto de manera negativa, en tanto se lo acusa de introducir el alcohol en la vida del indio, así como se habla de cómo se le sacó la tierra y se lo dejó sin nada. Pero cuando se pone al espectador del lado del indio se lo hace de una forma no compasiva; no se lo exculpa por lo que hizo mal o por no saber organizarse mejor para encontrar una estrategia, no se lo idealiza, ni perpetúa el mito del buen salvaje, sino que se le reconocen los derechos que le corresponden, que es algo que no se hacían es esa época. |
||||||||||||||||||||||
| MOVIES NOT YET REVIEWED: |
Burretita de Ypacarai (Armando Bo, 1962) Condor de oro (Enrique Muzio, 1996) Crónica de un extraño (Miguel Mirra, 1997) [A Qolla teenager moves to Buenos Aires to become a boxer. Unfinished.] Excursion a los indios ranqueles (Derlis M. Beccaglia, 1965) [unfinished] Hijo del rio (Ciro Cappellari, 1991) La India (Armando Bo, 1960) Leyenda del puente inca (José A. Ferreyra, 1923) Milagro de Ceferino Namuncurá (Máximo Berrondo, 1971) [A Mapuche woman married to a businessman is cured by a mapuche curandero.] Nobleza gaucha (Humberto Cairo, 1915, 63 min.) Nosilatiaj [La Belleza] (Daniela Seggiaro, 83 min, 2012) labellezanosilatiaj.com.ar Pallca (Alejandro Arroz, 2013, 90 min.) [Celina, an 11- year old girl from a Qolla community, wants to become a teacher and preserve the traditions of the highlands.] pallcafilm.blogspot.com Pampa barbara (Lucas Demare & Hugo Fregonese, 1945) [Malon Indians and gauchos battle for territory in the pampas.] Las pistas - Lanhoyij - Nmitaxanaxac (Sebastián Lingiardi, 2010, 50 min.) [A spy story with Wichi and Toba characters.] Payé (Mini-series, 2010) Prisioneros de la tierra (Mario Soffici, 1939) [based on stories by Horacio Quiroga] Savage Pampas (Hugo Fregonese, 1965) [U.S. remake of Pampa barbara] Sip’Ohi, el lugar del manduré (Sebastián Lingiardi, 2011) Tayin Mapu: Leyendas Mapuches (Facundo Ramilo, 2005) Tiempos menos modernos (Simon Franco, 2012) facebook.com/pages/Tiempos-menos-modernos-Not-so-modern-times/172575209482163 Trueno entre las hojas (Armando Bo, 1958) [Clásico antológico que inicia al binomio Sarli-Bó en el cine, con drama social y contestatario, acerca de la explotación del hombre en los obrajes y quebrachales. Basado en cuento de Augusto Roa Bastos. Pero cuando llega al medio de la selva Isabel con su cuerpo…se produce el caos! Realiza su primer baño, para quedarse en la historia del cine.] Ultimo Perro (Lucas Demare, 1956) Viento Sur (Mini-series, Sergio Cento Docato, 2012) Zafra (Lucas Demare, 1958) [Qollas living on the Argentine-Bolivian border are enslaved on sugar plantations.]
|
|
| MARTÍN FIERRO: | |
|
Martín Fierro (Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 1968)
La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 1974)
Los hijos de Fierro (Fernando Solanas, 1984) [allegory mixing Fierro legend with
the life of Juan Domingo Perón]
Martín Fierro (Fernando Laverde, 1989) [cartoon]
Martín Fierro, el ave solitaria (Gerardo Vallejo, 2006)
Martín Fierro, la película (Norman Ruiz, Liliana Romero, Fontanarrosa, 2007) [cartoon]
Vuelta de Martin Fierro (Enrique Dawi, 1974) [musical]
|
|
| SHORT FILMS / CORTOMETRAJES: | |
|
A Juan, jefe de tribu Collective authorship, 1991, 8 min. A personal meditation in the form of a letter addressed to a Guarani man living near the Iguazu waterfall. Una reflexión personal en forma de misiva dirigida al jefe de un poblado guaraní, ubicado en las inmediaciones, en las cataratas de Iguazú.
La canoa de Ulises
Catalina y el sol
Correa, la difunta
Les diamants des jaguars
Esculla
El fantasma del Inca
Hijos de la tierra
Kultrun
Leguas
La mirada perdida
La Tehuelchina
|
Catalina y el sol
|
Si tienes preguntas, comentarios, o sugerencias, escríbeme a:
squirreltree@yahoo.com
