Under the Same Moon (Bajo La Misma Luna)
Sponsored by HLSU (9/18/17) 7pm @ ASLC
Patricia Riggen/ Mexico/ 96 min / 2009 / Spanish with English subtitles “Bajo la Misma Luna” shows the hard edges of immigration with the story of a mother and a nine-year-old son, divided by border. Unexpected circumstances drive them both to embark on their own journeys in a desperate attempt to reunite.
The Fish Child (El Niño Pez)
Lucia Puenzo/ Argentina/ 96 min / 2009 / Spanish with English subtitles
Sponsored by Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) (9/19/17) 7pm @ ASLC
Premiered in the 59th Berlin International Film Festival, this adaptation from Puenzo’s first novel is about a desperate love story between two young girls of extremely different social backgrounds who, unable to find a place for their love in the world they live in, are pushed to commit a crime.
The Facilitator (El facilitador)
Victor Arregui / Ecuador, Chile, USA / 83 min / 2014 / Spanish with English subtitles
(10/2/17) 7pm @ ASLC
When Miguel, a successful businessman finds out about his illness, he asks his estranged daughter Elena to come back to Ecuador. She complies, but keeps a cold and distant relationship with him, opting for spending most of her time with friends, between drugs and alcohol. After a close call with the law, Miguel sends her to spend some time with her grandfather at the family’s estate. In this nostalgic house that brings up so many memories and nightmares, Elena meets her childhood friend Galo, who now promotes water access rights for the indigenous community. She is compelled by their way of life and gets involved with the political organization of the community. When the nightmares intensify, Elena starts digging behind the reports of the car accident that supposedly killed her mother. She will gradually understand that among family secrets, crimes, corruption, and dark perversions, commitment and beauty can emerge. A political thriller about human rights, The Facilitator is one of the most successful films to come out of Ecuador in the last few years.
Transito (Transit)
Daniel Avilés, Macarena Astorga, Santiago Oviedo (FSU) / Ecuador/ 17 min / 2014 / Spanish with English subtitles
(10/2/17) 7pm @ ASLC
David y Lucía do not know each other, even though there was a time they did. David has always been shy, while Lucía has been charming and the rest is life. A random morning, at a gas station, they casually meet. The remembrance of the past shakes their certainty and although they are not the same, there are things that have not changed.
Neruda
Pablo Larraín / Argentina, Chile, France, Spain / 107 min / 2016 / Spanish with English subtitles
(10/3/17) 7pm @ ASLC
It’s 1948 and the Cold War has reached Chile. In congress, Senator Pablo Neruda accuses the government of betraying the Communist Party and is swiftly impeached by President Gonzalez Videla. Police Prefect Oscar Peluchonneau is assigned to arrest the poet. Neruda tries to flee the country with his wife, Delia del Carril, but they are forced into hiding. Neruda, however, sees this struggle with his nemesis Peluchonneau as an opportunity to reinvent himself. He plays with the inspector, leaving clues designed to make their game of cat-and-mouse more dangerous, more intimate. In this story of a persecuted poet and his implacable adversary, Neruda recognizes his own heroic possibilities: a chance to become both a symbol for liberty and a literary legend. Featuring the acclaimed Gael Garcia Bernal, “Neruda” tells the story about Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, and the persecution he suffered from an emerging dictatorship in his home country in the late 1940s. The film casts the darkness of Chile’s later, bloodier period of military rule, and the political uncertainties of the Latin America’s present.
El Último Paso (The Last Step)
Juan Pablo Richter, Wara Cajías, Cristian Mercado, Antonio Peredo / Bolivia/ 10 min / Drama in Spanish with English subtitles.
(10/17/17) 7pm @ ASLC
Life depends on great decisions, the hardest ones. Lara and Mateo’s time to make their hardest decision, in which their life depends,has come.
Panama Canal Stories (Historias del Canal)
Abner Benaim, Carolina Borrero, Luis Franco Brantley, Pinky Mon, Pituka Ortega-Heilbron / Panama / 106 min / 2014 / English and Spanish with English subtitles
Sponsored by the Panamanian Student Association (9/26/17) 7pm @ ASLC
This impressive, sweeping historical drama chronicles five incredible stories of people who helped build the famous canal and Panama itself. Spanning a century, from 1913 to 2013, the film weaves together the tales of five remarkable characters: Clarice, a young Jamaican laborer forced to choose between love and survival at the hands her American and British bosses during the Canal’s construction; Jake, the son of an engineer who grows up in the ‘American zone’ in 1950s Panama but who really wants to be with his Panamanian friends; José, a student caught up in the 1960s political unrest and his love for a pretty American girl, Lucy; Silverio, a chauffeur for visiting U.S. politicians who is hired to spy on them by local political activists in 1977; and Clarice Jones, a jazz singer in New York City who discovers that her great- grandmother worked on the canal and decides to go to Panama to explore her to roots.
Red Gringo (Gringo Rojo)
Miguel Angel Vidaurre / Chile / 68 min / 2016 / Spanish with English subtitles
(10/10/17) 7pm @ ASLC
Reminiscent of Searching for Sugarman, director Miguel Ángel Vidaurre’s self-described “pop memory exercise” follows North American Singer Dean Reed’s surprising and unlikely political transformation after learning of the brutality and repression of U.S.-supported regimes in South America. Born in Lakewood, Colorado, Reed attempted to conquer the American music industry with his voice and charisma. His songs found modest success in the U.S., but became massive hits in Latin America. In 1962, with hopes of cashing in on his international popularity, Reed tours South America, where he undergoes a political awakening that earned him the nickname “The Red Elvis.” After being forced into exile, Reed settled in East Germany where he continued his career until his mysterious death in 1986. Making magnificent use of never seen old photographs, interviews, concert footage, and other unpublished material, Red Gringo sheds light on what was really happening in Latin America during the Cold War.
Juan Perros
Rodrigo Imaz / Mexico / 34 min / 2016 / Spanish with English subtitles
(10/10/17) 7pm @ ASLC
Juan Perros portrays a man who works tirelessly facing an arid and hostile environment to survive in the Mexican desert. His testimony involves us in a complex universe of thoughts that narrate his near death experience in a brutal attack that conditions him to live on the waste generated by society. Forgotten by his community Juan lives with his animals practicing a philosophy of humble and radical life.
Abuelos (Grandpas)
Carla Valencia Avila/ Chile-Ecuador/ 93 min / 2014 / Spanish with English subtitles
(10/17/17) 7pm @ All Saints
“Grandpas” is a documentary of the ancestry of a young Chilean woman, where both ancestors have contrasting tales: Juan was a concentration camp prisoner during the Pinochet dictatorship who died assassinated. Remo was a homeopathic doctor who finds the cure to a deadly tumor. This is a melancholic story, seen through the endearing eyes of a granddaughter. One doesn’t need to know botany –actually it’s enough to look carefully into one’s own crop– to realize family trees always have unexpected sprouts all over, from the roots to the newest leaf. In Abuelos –an intimate journal for a documentary search– Carla Valencia Dávila dialogs with her family’s past in order to find rare synchronicities which outline a historical time. The director develops a deep flashback on her own ancestors and unravels her personal origins, although she also ends up drawing the features of several Latin American generations. And she even unintentionally makes a short circuit that seems to result from crossing certain stripped wires from the literatures of Rodolfo Walsh and Gabriel García Márquez.
Yo Miro Para Adelante (I Look Ahead)
Carolina Caballero Berguiristain (FSU) / Miami, FL, USA/ 12 min / 2016 / Spanish with English subtitles
(10/17/17) 7pm @ ASLC
FSU student Carolina Caballero shows the stories of two immigrant Latina women who came to this country to build a better future, 40 years apart.
The Book of Life
Guillermo Del Toro, Jorge Gutierrez/US/94 min / 2014/English
Sponsored by The Center for Hispanic Marketing (10/17/17) 9:30am @ ASLC
The Book of Life is the journey of Manolo, a young man who is torn between fulfilling the expectations of his family and following his heart. Before choosing which path to follow, he embarks on an incredible adventure that spans three fantastical worlds where he must face his greatest fears. Rich with a fresh take on pop music favorites, this movie encourages us to celebrate the past while looking forward to the future.