Super Amigos, Mexico 2007, 82 minutes
By Arturo Perez Torres, the director of Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary
Mexico City is not Gotham City but if you ran into any of the five masked activists who protect this metropolis, you’d wonder if you were not living inside a comic book.
These modern-day Super Heroes are a group of Lucha Libre wrestlers who have taken their fight out of the ring and into the streets of the Mexican capital. Super Barrio, Super Gay, Ecologista Universal, Super Animal and Fray Tormenta are real-life masked Super Heroes who fight against evil slumlords, corrupt politicians, homophobia, pollution, animal rights abusers, and poverty. Though their true identity remains a mystery, they could easily be Mexico City’s most popular figures and last salvation.
SUPER AMIGOS is a feature-length documentary that follows these five modern-day Super Heroes as they fight for social justice and human rights in Mexico City.
Dos patrias: Cuba y la noche (Two Homelands: Cuba and the Night), Cuba 2006, 84 minutes
By Christian Liffers
Framed by the beautiful poetry of the oppressed Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, this revealing documentary features memorable portraits of five gay men and one transsexual woman living in and around Havana. Their disparate stories and candid interviews dispel myths while demonstrating a range of experience, opinion and social status.
It has been more than ten years since the success of films like Strawberry and Chocolate and Gay Cuba, so Two Homelands provides a fresh and important look at the present-day gay culture and community of an often misunderstood country that is still stuck in the past but also very dynamic and full of surprises. While exploring their contemporary struggle for sexual liberation, German director Christian Liffers offers intimate access to the private lives and the two homelands of these queer Cubans. Cuba is the country where they live, but the night is where they thrive: DOS PATRIAS: CUBA Y LA NOCHE - Two Homelands: Cuba and the Night.
"Portrayed with sensitivity", The New York Times
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Filmmaker Florence Jaugey with La Yuma lead actress Alma Blanco. |
Las Américas Film Network congratulates filmmaker Florence Jaugey on the completion of her fiction debut, La Yuma, a co-production with Nicaragua, Spain, Mexico, and France. Filmed on location in Managua, Nicaragua, with a strong cast of local actors, the film tells the story of Yuma, a young woman from an underprivileged neighborhood who pursues a boxing career as a way of escaping the adverse conditions of her daily life. A budding romance with Ernesto, a journalist from a middle-class family, shows the couple's contrasting visions of what life today in Nicaragua is and should be, and exposes both to new experiences, but their relationship is threatened by Yuma's jealous ex-boyfriend and her overprotective brother. Yuma's combined physical and emotional strength help her to follow the right path.
La Yuma is the first feature-length fiction film made in Nicaragua in the past 20 years. Jaugey produced the film with support from international funding sources, including Ibermedia, Cinergia, and Hubert Bals Fund of the Rotterdam International Film. La Yuma also won the Festival New Art Sound award at the Guadalajara Construye conference in March 2009.
Two of Jaugey's award-winning documentaries are currently available through Las Américas Film Network. La isla de niños perdidos (Island of Lost Children, Nicaragua, 2002, 80 min.) follows ten young inmates with decades-long sentences who participate in a video course inside the largest prison in Nicaragua. De niña a madre (Girls to Mothers, Nicaragua, 2006, 70 min.) narrates in two parts the lives of three adolescent girls from different regions of Nicaragua who became pregnant at a young age. Chapter 1 follows them through their pregnancy and birth, while Chapter 2 returns years later to see how they have survived as young mothers.
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Las Américas Film Network is pleased to announce the upcoming DVD release of the latest film by acclaimed filmmaker Estela Bravo, ¿Quién soy yo? Los niños encontrados de Argentina (Who Am I? The Found Children of Argentina, 2007, Argentina/UK/USA, 75 min.). Bravo points her camera at the 500 children born to disappeared parents during Argentina's military dictatorship and adopted by other families. This heart-wrenching film watches as several of the children, now grown up and tracked down, are reunite with relatives and must orient themselves in a new identity. Bravo's career as a filmmaker spans countries and continents, with special attention to the histories and social issues that connect Latin Americans throughout the world.
Las Américas also announces the upcoming release of a transcontinental musical road movie Nömadak Tx (Spain, 2006, 89 min.), from director team Pablo Iraburu and Harkaitz Martínez de San Vicente. The film documents the journey of several musicians from Basque Country who make and play the txalaparta – a traditional percussion instrument – and travel the world to share their music with other cultures. Through exchanges with a variety of other characters, from a Mongol musician to a Hindu taxi driver, from a Sami singer to an elderly Saharan woman, the txalaparta develops into a space of dialogue from which new things arise.
RECENT ADDITIONS
Eréndira, ikikunariby Juan Mora Cattlett, Mexico 2006, 117 minutes
El diablo y la rota noja (The Devil and the Red Page)by John Dickey, Mexico 2007, 75 minutes
Un poquito de tanta verdad (A Little Bit of So Much Truth)by Jill Irene Freidberg, Mexico 2007, 93 min