Latin American Film Festival Returns to JSU Oct. 6

10/01/2015

Jacksonville State University's Department of History and Foreign Languages in conjunction with Spanish and Latin American cinema distribution company PRAGDA and the Spanish Ministry on Education and Culture will present the 2015 Spanish Film Club, "Celebrating the New Wave of Ibero American Cinema," a month-long Latin American Film Festival on the JSU campus Oct. 6 – Nov. 10.

Each Tuesday at 5 p.m. in Wallace Hall, a different film will be screened. Before each screening there will be a discussion with Dr. Alexandra Martinez. This event is free. 

Movies that will be screened include:

PELO MALO: BAD HAIR
Mariana Rondón / Venezuela / 93 min / 2013 / Spanish with English subtitles
5:00 PM /October 6

A nine-year-old boy’s preening obsession with straightening his hair elicits a tidal wave of homophobic panic in his hard-working mother, in this tender but clear-eyed coming-of-age tale. Junior is a beautiful boy, with big brown eyes, a delicate frame, and a head of luxurious dark curls. But Junior aches to straighten those curls to acquire a whole new look befitting his emerging fantasy image of himself as a long-haired singer. As the opportunity approaches to have his photo taken for the new school year, that ache turns into a fiery longing. Junior’s mother, Marta, is barely hanging on. The father of her children has died, she recently lost her job as a security guard, and she now struggles to put a few arepas on the table for Junior and his baby brother. Junior doesn’t even know yet what it means to be gay, but the very notion prompts Marta to set out to “correct” Junior’s condition before it fully takes hold. This is a story of people doing what they feel they have to, partly out of fear, but also out of love.” - Diana Vargas, Toronto International Film Festival.

BAREFOOT IN THE KITCHEN: Con la Pata Quebrada
Diego Galán / Spain / 86 min / 2014 / Spanish with English subtitles 
5:00 PM /October 13

Co-produced by Pedro Almodóvar’s production company El Deseo and veteran Spanish producer Enrique Cerezo, this illuminating survey was put together by Diego Galán, a noted Spanish film critic and former director of San Sebastian Film Festival. Reflecting changes in the political sphere, Barefoot in the Kitchen chronicles how Spanish cinema has portrayed the evolution of women from the 1930s to the present day, using film fragments from 180 movies. Galán demonstrates how landmarks in the recent history of Spain can be directly indicated by shifts in social mores in cinema. By the time of All About My Mother (1990), women had turned the tables on men and on cinematic sexism, present since the early days of the talkies. – Jaie Laplante, Miami International Film Festival. 

I TRAVEL BECAUSE I HAVE TO, I COME BACK BECAUSE I LOVE YOU (Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo)
Marcelo Gomes, Karim Aïnouz / Brazil / 71 min / 2009 / Portuguese with English subtitles
5:00 PM /October 20

In this hauntingly melancholy film, geologist José Renato, travels to Sertão, an isolated region in Northeastern Brazil. His goal is to assess possible routes for a water canal from the region’s only river. For many of the region’s inhabitants, the canal will be a lifeline, the chance of a future and source of hope. But for those living on the canal’s direct course, it means only requisitions, departure and loss 

SOUTHERN DISTRICT (Zona Sur)
Juan Carlos Valdivia / Bolivia / 108 min / 2011 / Spanish with English subtitles
5:00 PM /October 27

La Paz’s Zona Sur neighborhood is Bolivia’s most exclusive enclave and has housed the country’s affluent elite for generations. Here, in an adobe-tile-roofed castle, a statuesque matriarch reigns over her spoiled offspring and indigenous servants. Social change, however unwelcome, is on its way. As the mother squabbles with her self-indulgent, oversexed teenage son and clashes with her petulant daughter, her 6-year-old boy wanders the rooftops unsupervised. The scent of impending decline permeates the air, and the threat of aristocratic privileges quickly changing hands heralds a new era in a seemingly interminable class war. Bolivia’s official entry for the Academy® Awards foreign-language film race, this searing portrait of a patrician family in flux eloquently chronicles their final days during a time of intense social change and cogently exposes the bubble of decadence in which they exist.

WITH MY HEART IN YAMBO (Con Mi Corazon En Yambo)
María Fernanda Restrepo/ Ecuador / 137 min / 2012 / Spanish with English subtitles
5:00 PM / November 3

In 1988, when director Fernanda Restrepo was only 10 years old, her life changed in the cruelest of ways: her two brothers—then 14 and 17—vanished without a trace. Only later did the family learn that the boys had been illegally detained, tortured, and murdered by the Ecuadorean police. Now, decades later, with her brothers’ remains still missing, Restrepo embarks on the painful journey of recounting her family’s story. In the process, she comes face to face with the suspects, and documents yet one more search in Lake Yambo, where the boys’ bodies were dumped. 

YVY MARAEY: LAND WITHOUT EVIL
Juan Carlos Valdivia / Bolivia / 105 min / 2014 / Spanish and Guaraní with English Subtitles 
5:00 PM / November 10

A Bolivian filmmaker and a Guaraní indian travel together through the forests of South Eastern Bolivia with the intention of making a film about the Guarani People. The starting point is a 1911 film by Swedish explorer Erland Nordenskiöld. But today’s reality turns out to be much more intense than the nostalgia for a lost world. In Yvy Maraey, the white man (the director) and the Indian create and interpret their own characters, walking the thin line between documentary, fiction, and performance. Far from observing another culture, we are watched and questioned about our identity in a country undergoing enormous social, political, and historical change as it struggles to create an intercultural society.