HISPANIC WORLD

One of the masterpieces of Hector Babenco. William Hurt and Raul Julia are excellent. Don't miss Sonia Braga.

one of Inarritu's hard works

This story, based on real events that took place in Argentina, looks at a married couple torn apart by the campaign of killings and torture that sent thousands of accused political leftists to unmarked graves in the mid 1970s known as the Dirty War.

The story begins after Alicia (Norma Aleandro), a high school teacher and, Roberto (Héctor Alterio), a wealthy businessman and lawyer, adopt a little girl named Gaby (Analia Castro). After five years have passed Alicia wonders about the parents of Gaby, a topic her husband has told her to forget as it was a condition of the adoption. Yet, he knows the ugly story of his daughter's adoption.

While hard to believe, Alicia, and others in Argentina, are not aware of how much killing and suffering has gone on in the country until her students begin to complain that the "government approved" history books they read were written by government "assassins."

At this time she also has a long conversation with Ana (Chunchuna Villafañe), an old friend, who had been in exile in Europe for seven years after she was tortured and raped by paramilitary forces loyal to the brutal Argentine government for having lived with a so-called subversive. Alicia begins to do some serious political and personal research on her own.

Alicia learns the identity of Gaby's grandmother, Sara, (Chela Ruiz), who reveals the identity of the girl's dead parents. She finds out that her husband had a hand in the government's nasty repression and has intensive dealings with foreign business interests. At a family dinner Roberto Ibáñez has an intense political argument with his elderly father and brother where he espouses the political view-point of the conservative military ruling elite, and his father and brother argue from the side of social justice.

The film suggests that the old woman may not actually be Gaby's grandmother, and briefly explores the fact that Gaby's true family may never be known. This juxtaposition of fact and emotion are meant to evoke the mood of hope and hopelessness in reaction to a war environment.

The story ends tragically when Alicia confronts her husband. He wants her to forget about the past and look to the future. He becomes enraged and repeatedly slams her head into the wall. Alicia gets her keys to go get Gaby, and we are left to wonder if she will return to her marriage, take Gaby and live alone, or return Gaby to her "real" family. Although it could be assumed that Alicia will not return to her home because she leaves the house keys in the lock.

Let the world change you... and you can change the world.

In January 1952, the almost 30-year-old biochemist Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna) and his younger friend, the 23-year-old student close to finishing his medical degree, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (Gael García Bernal), set off from Buenos Aires on an old but treasured Norton 500 for an adventure through Latin America. The first part of their journey is more or less as they expected, although the arduous trip takes it toll on La Poderosa, The Mighty One as they nicknamed the motorbike, and it gives up the ghost in Chile, after a nasty encounter with a herd of cows. By the time they get to Machu Pichu, the middle class young men have begun to see Latin America through eyes that have been opened to poverty and oppression, high-handed big business and the sheer hardship of daily life. They find themselves at a leper colony in the Peruvian Amazon, and Guevara, whose speciality is leprology, realises that something fundamental deep inside his being has changed.

A road story in Argentain.

Rising stars are not handsome enough in comparison with Hollywood legens. 4 outstanding performances by Javier BARDEM. 2004-2007.

The paths of Otto and Ana literally cross as children: Ana (Sara Valiente), running away from the news of her father's death; Otto (Peru Medem), running after a soccer ball. They are captivated by each other, but leave without saying a word. One day, Otto learns that his parents are divorcing, and to prove his devotion to his mother (Beate Jensen), he chooses to stay with her. In school, he begins to write notes on the nature of love, a question that has plagued him since his parents' divorce, and folds the notes into paper airplanes to send into the school yard. Ana retrieves one of the notes and shows it to her mother, Olga (Maru Valdivielso), who is intrigued by the emotional maturity of the message. Ana points to the nearest adult, Otto's father, Alvaro (Nancho Novo), as the author. On a rainy afternoon, Otto waits for Ana in the school yard with a specific introduction in mind: he would say that his name is a palindrome, that it is spelled the same way backwards and forwards, and that somehow, this revelation would endear him to her. But she does not appear. He opens the door to his father's car...and Ana is there. He begins to recite his rehearsed speech, but she interrupts. Her name is a palindrome too. Soon, Alvaro and Olga become involved, and the two children grow up as step siblings. Ana sees her father's soul reflected in Otto's eyes, and their profound connection makes them inseparable. But their love for each other proves more permanent than their parents' relationship. Now a young man, Otto (Fele Martinez), decides to move in with his father to be closer to Ana (Najwa Nirmi), and a tragedy results from his actions. Racked with guilt, Otto runs away from home. After a failed relationship, Ana also runs away, and moves to a remote cabin in Finland that straddles the Arctic Circle to await the "coincidence" of her life.

Julio Medem creates a hauntingly beautiful and intensely atmospheric story of fate and destiny in Lovers of the Arctic Circle. Similar to Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique and Red, near and chance encounters transcend the novelty of convenient plot device to expound on the film's circular themes and recurring patterns. In addition to the story unfolding in circular narrative, specific events also recur within the film, recounted from separate perspectives by Ana and Otto. Episodically, the film begins and ends with the image of Otto reflected in Ana's eyes. Their palindromic names, near collisions with the trolley car, and an encounter with Otto's namesake, Otto Midelman (Joost Siedhoff), further reflect the film's circular structure. In Ana's opening monologue, she asks: "Can you run back? A few hours back, a life back?" In the land of the midnight sun, in the surreality of the Arctic Circle, it is still not far enough to escape one's destiny.

Earth Entranced (Terra em Transe) is certainly the most controversial film of Brazilian auteur Glauber Rocha?s output, and remains one of the most confrontational pieces of work in global cinema. Rocha was the key figure of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, a movement that has come to be known as the archetypal Third Cinema. So while people may talk about the ideological conflicts in the West during the 1960s, what went on in Paris, San Francisco etc. seems like a first-year university student picking up Das Kapital for the first time when compared to the tumult in Latin America. Few countries, including Brazil, escaped conflict and bloodshed. And while Brazil?s conflicts weren?t so violent, there were a number of highly traumatic changes, such as the sudden 1964 coup which overthrew the leftist government of João Goulart.

Film, like all art, found itself in the middle of this. And while the original Cinema Novo movement started off based on Italian neo-realism and the French Nouvelle Vague, the sudden shift in the social climate fostered a cinema that was integrally a part of and fundamentally opposed to the social change. As the powers that be became increasingly authoritarian, the filmmakers were forced to become more and more symbolic and coded. Consequently, it is almost impossible to read a Brazilian Cinema Novo film without ever considering the social context, and it?s certainly important to consider it when looking at Earth Entranced.

After all, Rocha is unashamedly targeting his films at Brazilians. This is cinema that attempts to change, to subvert, to move away from the ?imperialist? Hollywood and the ?bourgeois? New Wave. As a result, his films are hard to decipher from a Western perspective (hint confusing). However, that doesn?t mean the films aren?t fresh, or revolutionary, or exciting.

Earth Entranced follows on from his more well-known work Black God, White Devil (voted the greatest Brazilian film of all-time), and Antonio das Mortes (the only film to date that?s available to watch in Wellington ? at the Victoria University library). Made a few years after the 1964 coup, Rocha appears to wonder how a coup can take place so quickly and without any resistance. The quick-shifting political allegiances, and selfishness of those in power that Rocha demonstrates in the film are clearly linked to what went on Brazil ? and it?s for this reason probably that both the Left and the Right vociferously derided the depictions of politics in the film. And indeed, the film was banned for some time.

The film is set in the fictional country of El Dorado. Of course, this is a none too subtle symbolic reference to Brazil (also drawing on the potent mythology of the famed city of riches). The film follows Paulo Martins, an idealistic journalist who finds himself caught between two equally corrupt and dangerous politicians. Of course, chuck in nationalisation, foreign companies, populism, religion, money, and political flip-flops and you?ve got a pretty brutal view of Brazil. This isn?t merely a Marxist rant, rather it?s a very pessimistic deconstruction of the failure of politics and ideology in the Brazilian context. This is set-up right from the outset within the narrative.

The editing style is definitely from the Soviet montage school of cutting. Jarring juxtapositions and temporal discontinuity abound. While the narrative could hardly be called focused, the images are potent, from the orgiastic celebrations of the upper class, to the characters? direct confrontation to the camera. The penultimate image is also amazing, as Paulo takes on the sky with a gun. The sound is quite remarkable ? it?s an almost subjective mishmash of music, poetry and charged dialogue. This is the first time that many of these Brazilian films have been screened in New Zealand, and after watching Earth Entranced it?s a rare privilege (if you can call it that) to see films burn with such intensity and anger.

http://www.centraldobrasil.com.br/fr_sin_e.htm

The time when we write a letter on papper by pen and still use envelope and stamp.

A Brezilian Masterpiece.

When chaos hits, no one is morally or philosophically unscathed. Such is the moral of "Blindness," based on Portuguese author Jose Saramago's 1995 best seller and adapted to the screen by Brazil's Fernando Meirelles ("City of God").

The chaos in this case is a sudden epidemic of blindness that strikes an entire city, leaving the afflicted and the government equally helpless to cope. From the opening scene of the very first victim, "Man in a Car" (played by Yusuke Iseya), the story gloomily prophesizes that when the chips are down, people will behave like crooks or animals. At a busy intersection, the Man finds his vision awash in a milky white light ? he can't see anymore. A seemingly friendly passerby (Don McKellar, who's also the screenwriter for the film) drives him home, only to steal his car. A few minutes later he, too, is struck by blindness.

There's a certain meanness to Meirelles' gaze that's rather an oversimplification of Saramago's original, philosophical tone; as he paints this apocalyptic fable, there's a distinct I-told-you-so smugness running like a sneaky undercurrent beneath the surface moralizing. And there is a lot of moralizing, tempered with not so subtle references to the general state of human living, starting with the overriding theme: We're all blind.

From the scene of an ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) suddenly besieged by people ranting that they can't see anymore, before he too goes blind and gives into desperate panic like everyone else ? to the sage, intellectual pronouncements voiced by the "Man With the Black Eye Patch" (Danny Glover) such as, "In many ways you know, blindness is a state of mind," the tone of the whole package swings between ineffectual helplessness and ineffectual posturing. Either way no one is saved, much less able to see their way to the nearest restroom.

Speaking of which, Meirelles draws the process of large-scale panic giving way to the dreary realities of filth and sewage with chilly assurance. The government, as soon as they're alerted about the epidemic, rounds up the afflicted and herds them into hospitals in the manner of Nazis marching Holocaust victims into gas chambers. In makeshift quarantine facilities (most of them hastily vacated hospitals and clinics), people are allowed to live but deprived of all dignity and within hours the restrooms have become disaster zones, pipes are busted and the ceilings leak with scum.

Anarchy prevails until the self-proclaimed "King of Ward 3" (Gael Garcia Bernal) seizes power by hoarding all the food and demanding valuables or sexual favors in return for nourishment. The raping and pillaging perpetrated by the King and his band of men are senselessly brutal ? and if Meirelles wanted to drive the point that humans have no need for war or politics to make them to behave like depraved soldiers ? he certainly succeeds.

Shining like a brilliant light amid the sordid muck is the ophthalmologist's wife (Julianne Moore) ? inexplicably, she has retained the power of sight, but pretends to be blind so she can be with her husband in the quarantine clinic. Being able to see in a mass of raving blind people, however, proves much more difficult ? and disgusting ? than she had bargained for, and her efforts to restore some semblance of order are, literally, shattered.

Meirelles has assembled an able cast, but they're hindered by the uniform gestures and physical peculiarities (that caused an offended uproar among genuine blind people) expected of the blind. It's up to Moore (who is, at least, unencumbered by physical awkwardness) to carry the film ? and the clinic. But it's thankless, uphill work, and Meirelles does nothing to make life easier for her. One of her self-imposed tasks had been to prevent the rape incidents on the premises, but she fails miserably and then falls prey to one herself.

This horrific, no-exit story recalls the claustrophobic queasiness of other apocalyptic films ("Children of Men" for example, in which Moore also had a prominent role) but those were sunk in dungeon hues of despair and darkness. "Blindness" is lit by a retina-piercing whiteness ? it's like standing on a sunny ski slope without sunglasses. Never has hell seemed so bright, and here its very brilliance mocks any attempt at hope.

An exemplary postmodern documentary that considers the limits and potential of film to convey ideas, Joao Moreira Salles' "Santiago" is a deeply human work of art.

Birdwatchers effectively conveys the plight of the Guarani Indians who thrived in the forests of Brazil for centuries and refused to enter Jesuit missions. They have their own distinctive religion and believe that the invasion of their land by Europeans is not only theft but a serious attack on their very identity.

As this documentary-style fiction ends with the bald fact that, during the savage Argentinian dictatorship of the 70s, several thousand tortured prisoners were dropped, while still alive, into the sea, you have already been confronted by scene after scene of low-key horror.

Brazil.

Brazil.

A masterpiece.

The world where we live.

The story focuses on the dynamic between the three leads, all of whom are excellent. Tenoch is from a wealthy (political) family, whereas Julio is from a lower-middle class family, and lives is a cramped apartment with his family. There always a slight tension in their relationship, neither entirely confortable in the world of the other. With the addition of Luisa, there's a new element of competition.

There's a strong fascinatino with death running as an undercurrent to the film, the camera lingering on a crashed car at the side of the road, a voice over explaining about a pedestrian killed by a car on the way to work. This isn't to suggest that the film is overly dark -- there is a lot of humour drawn from the teenagers-behaving-badly elements of the film.

EUFS

EUFS is too optimistic. A.C seems to me quite weak in this matter. Teens, sex, comedy, agony. Take yr. pick. Guess what ?????????????