Chicago Latino Film Festival
Three short stories by Brazilian playwright Nelson Rodrigues inspired this 1998 anthology film about sexual infidelity, directed by Arthur Fontes, Claudio Torres, and Jose Henrique Fonseca. (Water Tower, 6:00)
Things I Forgot to Remember
Sonia (Johana Martinez), a young Honduran woman working as a maid in Los Angeles, is disturbed by dreams of her dead mother beckoning her to return home. Her life as a single mother in the U.S. is bleak and disappointing, and the film’s handling of it borders on the amateurish. But once Sonia arrives on the east coast of Honduras among the Garifuna, a mix of West Africans and Carib Indians, the film acquires a poetic (if uneven) tone. Its raison d’etre seems to be the Dugu, an elaborate West African ritual that appeases the spirit of the dead; Sonia’s extended family cook a feast by the sea, sing and dance, pray to tribal gods, and follow up with a Catholic mass. The story of a woman reclaiming her tribal roots recalls Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, though this 1998 feature by Ali Allie is less lyrical and more modest in scope. (TS) On the same program, The Age of the Heart (1999), a Brazilian short by Tamy Marrachine. (Facets Multimedia Center, 7:00)
Crane World
A small independent theater in Buenos Aires struggles to survive, threatened by lack of funds, power shortages, construction of a shopping mall nearby, and a rainstorm that’s been going on for 1,600 days. Fernando E. Solanas (The Hour of the Furnaces) directed this 1998 Argentinean film. (Water Tower, 8:50)
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Few works have captured the powerful pull of ghetto life as well as this video by Laurie Collyer, which documents five years in the life of a Puerto Rican welfare family in Brooklyn. Only the oldest child, Robert, has escaped, to a Manhattan apartment and a career educating Latino kids; he’s contrasted with the three drug-addled siblings he tries to help. Danny knows he should get a job but speaks passively about his life (“Shit flips on you”), while Robert reminds us that during Danny’s teenage years in jail he received no education or vocational training. The older sisters became teenage mothers, and most of their children wind up living in grandmother’s small apartment; Collyer’s handheld camera does an excellent job portraying this crowded space and the interdependency of people living in such close quarters, so it’s no shock when sister Tati loses her apartment and Danny is returned to prison for seven years. The grandchildren, though, are full of life–one plays in Danny’s lap as he nods off, an image that leaves the viewer with the disturbing question of which way these kids are headed. (FC) (Facets Multimedia Center, 9:00)
