MARIA BETHANIA – Touchstone from Aruanda
BRAZIL, 2006
Director: Andrucha Waddington
Feature Doc, 60 minutes
Maria Bethânia has a solid, long musical career in her shoulders. She was the first Brazilian singer to sell 1 millon CD’s in 1978 with the album ALIBI. From there on, everybody in Brazil started calling her the Queen Bee of brazilian music. Not bad for a girl from Bahia who had a strange, low voice, and dreamed of being an actress.
To date, Maria Bethania has released more than 30 CDs, many of them in partnership with the great names of brazilian popular music: Edu Lobo, Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, Vinicius de Moraes, and of course her no less famous brother Caetano Veloso (performing in Toronto in November).
Andrucha Waddington, the young Brazilian film director well known in the rest of the world for his third feature drama The House of Sand, works this documentary with great care and simplicity.
To approach a singer like Maria Bethania requires a good sense of rhythm and flare. Something which the director has demonstrated in his long list of music videos of all kinds of Brazilian music. But this is not your typical flashy music video-documentary on a successful artist. On the contrary, it touches on a more core and sensitive theme: the visitation of now two famous artists, sister and brother, to their mother living in a remote area of Brazil, just to be together united by their love of family and music.
Switching from an open air night concert opening with Bethania in full adrenaline mode to backstage clips and later to a more intimate zone, the film enters into its real pace. That is to say, a reflexive, musical trip, to visit their mother Mrs Canó at her home town in Santo Amaro da Purificacão, in the state of Bahia.
We are invited to the small family reunion and to participate in a gathering where the memories, the laughs, and of course the songs, couldn’t be more simple, moving and beautiful.
BLUFF
COLOMBIA, 2007
Director: Felipe Martinez
Feature Film, 103 minutes
From newcomer director Felipe Martinez of Colombia comes this fast moving black comedy, something that Hollywood films showing Colombian life are not. This is probably the first time that you will see a film that depicts a real approach to life, relationships, and language in Bogotá City, albeit one that is comic and full of twists (and bluffs).
Just a year ago Nicolas was a successful photographer working for an entertainment magazine and living with his girlfriend Margarita. Everything was working fine until the day he caught her in a compromising situation with Mallarino, his boss and owner of the magazine. At that moment he lost Margarita, his house and also his job.
Margarita and Mallarino got married, and Nicolas became a wedding photographer, since Mallarino made sure to leave him out of any other possibility. Now Nicolas lives in a rented small little room in Rosemary’s apartment, the lover of Walter Montes, a policeman.
Faithful to his promise of revenge, Nicolas has been following Mallarino for some time and has discovered that he is cheating Margarita by carrying on an affair with an actress and model named Alexandra. He photographs them kissing. Knowing his moment has finally come, he calls Mallarino, hoping to blackmail him. But to his surprise, Mallarino doesn’t care about the photos. Margarita already knows everything and has asked him for divorce. But what really worries Mallarino and his lover is that his wife wants a good part of his fortune. He decides to make Nicolas a counter offer of a million dollars if he kills Margarita. That is when things start to get complicated and the film becomes even more interesting.
Principal Cast: Federico Lorusso, Victor Mallarino, Catalina Aristizabal, Carolina Gomez, Luis Eduardo Arango, Veronica Orozco.
UN FRANCO,14 PESETAS/CROSSING BORDERS
SPAIN, 2006
Director: Carlos Iglesias
Feature Film, 105 minutes
As we are living in a world marked by huge movements and displacement of peoples all over the world, this Spanish dramatic comedy film will surely touch many newcomers to Canada. Of course it touches on politics but that is not the main theme.
Spain 1960. Franco is in power and the country is undergoing as industrial reorganization. Many workers lose their jobs and are forced to emigrate. Two friends, Martin and Marcos, decide to look for work abroad. Martin, his wife Pilar and their son Pablito live with Martin’s parents in a basement apartment that comes with their job as superintendent of the building. Martin and Marcos think Switzerland is their best bet. They leave their families behind in Spain and head off on a journey to the free, progressive part of Europe. Unable to get a work permit from the Swiss Consulate, the two men pretend they are tourists. Once inside Switzerland, however, they have to adapt to a very different way of life, living in a small industrial town and working as mechanics. When Pilar and Pablito arrive in Switzerland along with Marcos’ girlfriend Maria del Carmen, it marks the end of the friends’s bachelor life. Now it’s all work and family responsibilities. Pablito begins going to school; he learns a new language; Switzerland is becoming his home. When Martin’s father dies,  however, he and Pilar decide they want to return to Spain. Much to their surprise, going home is a lot harder that leaving was.
Principal Cast: Carlos Iglesias, Javier Gutierrez, Nieve de Medina, Isabel Blanco, Ivan Martin, Tim Frederic Quast, Eloisa Vargas, Aldo Sebastianelli, Angela del Salto.
ARGENTINA, LAND OF GUITARS
ARGENTINA, 2007
Director: Antonio Cervi
Feature Doc, 75 minutes
Don’t’ think for a moment that you have to be a guitar fanatic to enjoy this trip. Just a fan of excellent music will do. This is an unusual feature documentary by director Antonio Cervi. He had the good idea to record a musical phenomenon that’s been happening in Argentina since 1995. That was the year the Festival of Guitars of the world (Festival Guitarras del mundo) started in Buenos Aires with a small group of talented guitarists. Since then, the event has grown to more than two hundred guitarists and musicians coming from all over the world to Argentina to show their talent. And what an incredible, vibrant, amount of talent that is! In the format of a quasi “road movie” the film takes us to the landscapes and music of Argentina via the magic of the guitar in all its different origins, rhythms and styles. The parade of super players from so many countries and with so different 
rhythms, simply demonstrates the richness and possibilities of the instrument. Solo players, duos, trios, quartets, whole orchestras of guitars, playing to the delight of big audiences and admirers. Concerts in theatres, but also round the corners of the city and parks. Popular, folk styles, and classical, complex, styles; little virtuoso concerts in the street; joyful playing in the bars and restaurants of Buenos Aires; intense bohemian late night guitar players among musicians and friends; players from other provinces of Argentina; from neighboring countries like Uruguay, Chile and Paraguay; from Mexico, Spain, Italy and all over Europe. They all come to play to this place. “Everybody in Argentina has a guitar at home” says one of the musicians in the film, well, now we see that they are not the only ones. It seems that the passion is contagious and expanding, and that the whole world has a guitar at home.
CHAVEZ, THE PEOPLE HAVE AWOKEN - THE VENEZUELAN REVOLUTION
Venezuela/New Zeland, 2007
Directors: Ricardo Restrepo and Julia Capon
Activo Productions
Feature Doc, 56 minutes - Digital
Using one of the largest oil reserves in the world to construct a new social and political order in Venezuela, Chavez has supported some of the most controversial social programs in the world. It seems that suddenly Venezuela has taken a leap from Latin America onto the world stage. In that leap forward Fidel Castro is a counseling friend and Bush and the United States the worst things that could happen to well…everybody. That Chavez is an audacious man, no one can doubt. Who else but a repeatedly elected “people’s man” would call the president of the United States “the devil”? Having survived a military coup in 2002, Hugo Chavez and the new Venezuela in construction, are experimenting with the difficult ways of finding political and economic democracy. Is it a realistic goal for Venezuelal? The majority of the press and political analysts in the North of the Americas, depicts him as a dictator squandering the wealth of a nation and blocking democratic freedoms. But is this true? Filmed during the December 2006 elections, the documentary gives voice to the people behind the ongoing revolutionary process in the country. And also to several analysts from a wide political spectrum. From a former CIA and Pentagon security analyst to the controversial Venezuelan lawyer who authored “The Chavez Code”. Many questions loom in the background: who and how many are behind the movement and what does it seek? In his florid, clear, public speeches, Chavez says that his vision for Venezuela is neither Left nor Right. But is there a place for a Third Position? Half a century ago Peron tried that in Argentina, had a good start and finally failed victim of his own egomania. Is Chavez going to follow his steps or will he create a new kind of Third Position?
SANTIAGO
Brazil, 2006
Director: Joao Moreira Salles
Feature Doc, 80 minutes
Black & White - Digital
Santiago is one of those persons you will never forget. He is a professional butler who is in love with his work, and with the people he has worked for all his life. And one of those people is, Joao Moreira Salles, the director of the film. He himself has said that Santiago is a documentary about the failure of a film. He did shoot a lot of footage for the film in 1992, but could not edit it at the time. In 2005 the director went back to the project in search of a reason for his false start. He couldn’t find a substantial one. Santiago had served as a butler in the house where he grew up and was a man of vast culture and a prodigious memory. A man whose idiosyncrasies left a profound mark on the family’s memories. Someone capable of writing a 30,000 page history of the world’s greatest aristocracies. And a man whose memories the director clearly treasures as they also belong to his personal family history. More than a decade later, the director returns to his original footage –in wonderful Black & White photography- to create a layered tribute to his now deceased family servant. It is a great story that could have easily been the subject of a feature film with John Gielgud playing a perfect Santiago.
FUGA
CHILE, 2006
Director: Pablo Larraín
Feature Film, 110 minutes
One of the best productions to come out of the bubbling Chilean film industry in the last years. With notable photography in the hands of Miguel Joan Littín, who excels in creating the climate and intensity required by such a textured story. A difficult “tale to tell”. It is the story of a strange melody, how a talented musician loose it and later tries to recuperate it, and how another man tries to make it his own. A wired trip through a family story, music and madness.
It is the first feature film for young Larraín, who comes straight from advertising, and it shows. We mean that as a compliment.
Eliseo Montalbán is a composer and conductor with a creative block. As a boy he witness the death of his sister who was murdered on top of a piano, accidentally composing a melody in the process. Montalban becomes an obsessed, mentally disturbed musician, a man trapped by an unfinished score. While he is interned in a psychiatric institution , another musician , Ricardo Coppa, happens across the unfinished work and, unaware of the dangers involved in doing so, decides that it is his duty to complete it and get it heard. At first he pretends that the music is his own, but Coppa is a mediocre composer, a sort of latter-day Salieri, and the musicians he approaches quickly recognize the differences between what Montalbán wrote and what Coppa added. Still, Montalbán notes are haunting…
Principal Cast: Benjamín Vicuña, Gastón Pauls, María Izquierdo, Willy Semler, Francisco Imboden, Héctor Noguera, Alfredo Castro, Alejandro Trejo.
PANCHO VILLA, THE REVOLUTION HAS NOT ENDED
MEXICO, 2007
Director: Francesco Taboada Tabone
Feature Documentary, 95 minutes
A few years ago we screened with great success, The Last Zapatistas, an unusual and powerful documentary from director Francesco Taboada on the Mexican icon Emiliano Zapata and his legacy. This year we’re bringing his last work on a subject that seldom has been touched by filmmakers in the long-suffering history of the Mexican people: the revolutionary Pancho Villa and his legacy.
Photographed and produced by Manuel Peñafiel, the documentary explores the causes and motives leading up to a revolution in a country that had been ruled by a colonial power for over five-hundred years.
“The conditions of injustice, misery and government corruption that exists today “director Taboada says, “are almost the same as those prevailing in Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the revolution broke out. Our objective is to denounce this historic spiral so that the people of America do not forget the inheritance flowing in their blood from the men and women who, thorough out the centuries, have given their lives for an ideal.”
In the early hours of March 16, 1916, the troops of Pancho Villa invaded the continental territory of the United States. They attacked the village of Columbus. At the same time a baby was born in Nazas, Durango. The baby was the son of General Pancho Villa and was baptized with the name of Ernesto Villa Navas. When his father was murdered by the government in 1923, his mother hurriedly took him to California and told him: “Never tell anybody who your father was because we will be killed”.
Eighty three years later, old Ernesto Villa Navas came to his father’s land and discovered that General Villa is one of the most respected heroes in his country, and a moral guide for millions of peasants throughout Mexico. This is the story of Pancho Villa as told by those who knew him.
Director Francesco Taboada Tabone is a Mexican History Professor and researcher going for his Master’s degree in Mesoamerican Studies at the UNAM (Autonomous National University of Mexico).
HIJOS DE LA GUERRA/SONS OF THE WAR
USA, 2007
Director: Alexandre Fuchs
Feature Documentary, 81 minutes
Ernesto Miranda and Francisco Campos were teenagers when they “founded” the MS-13 in El Salvador. Forty years later Francisco says to the camera: “Our children were born violent because their fathers were at war. The one we lived through”.
From the street of Los Angeles to the ghettos of El Salvador, this film is an unsentimental, raw look, at what happens when the children of war decide that they have little to lose if they lose it all.
It is a powerful feature documentary about the world largest and most violent street gang: the Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13.
The MS-13 gangs spans the Americas with an estimated membership of 100,000 people across the United States and Central America. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has declared it the fastest growing and most violent street gang in the United States. And it has classified the fight against the M-13 as one of its top enforcement priorities.
The Mara Salvatrucha was formed in Los Angeles during the late 1980’s by Salvadorean civil war refugees seeking to protect themselves from rival ethnic gangs.
At its inception, the newly formed gang channeled the widespread trauma and impact of genocidal war on entire generations of orphaned and abandoned kids into maniacal violence. This formed the basis for MS’s explosive growth. The implementation of stern and increasingly systematic U.S. deportation policies, along with forceful Salvadorean armed repression of members, has radicalized the group. Instead of reducing the gang’s influence, these policies have driven the gang to become even more aggressive and larger, and a force which seems increasingly difficult to control. HIJOS DE LA GUERRA is the first feature length documentary film to tell the real history of the MS-13 and its chilling rise to power.
EL BENNY
CUBA, 2006
Director: Jorge Luis Sánchez
Producer: Iohamil Navarro
Music: Juan Manuel Ceruto
Feature Film, Musical Drama, 120 minutes
This movie, a co-production between Coral Capital Entertainment and the Cuban film institute, ICAIC, brings to the big screen, this passionate story of music, love, genius and tragedy set in Havana during the 40s and 50s.
Director Jorge Luis Sanchez and screenwriter Abraham Rodriguez collaborate to recount the eventful life of 1950s-era Cuban bandleader Benny Moore in a non-linear biography that begins when the mambo king was at the top of his game.
The year is 1952, and hard-living bandleader Benny Moore (Renny Arozarena) has decided to part ways with his longtime orchestra and form a new combo. Now under the management of the ambitious taxi driver Olimpio (Enrique Molina), the rising star's lustre quickly begins to fade as he enters into a relationship with Olimpio's niece Aida (Limara Menesses) and takes to the bottle as a means of coping with his stratospheric fame.
El Benny is a fictional story based on the life of the famous Cuban musician Benny Moré, the greatest Cuban musician of all time, who died far too young yet profoundly changed the course of Latin music.
More famous during his lifetime in Venezuela and Mexico than in his home country of Cuba, he was asked to play at the Oscars in Los Angeles in 1957, not long before he died.
The film concentrates on a period in the early 1950s when Moré leaves the orchestra of Duany and starts his own 'Banda Gigante'. Never having formally studied music, he arranged big band orchestras and combos from the music he heard in his head and felt in his soul. A true musical genius, Benny was a man of supreme charisma and passion, but his nocturnal carousing with women, and too much partying led to his untimely death.
His legacy resonates today in most Latin music.
On a note of interest: A host of world class Cuban musicians, directed by Juan Manuel Ceruto (Latin Grammy Award for “Rumba Soy Yo”) took part in the sound track of El Benny. Classic songs were re-orchestrated and re-recorded in state-of-the-art recording studios with Cuba’s top session musicians. Ceruto, Juan Formell and Eduardo Ramos composed songs especially for the film, while Chucho Valdés (one of Cuba’s most renowned piano player) and the Cuban rap group Orishas composed special pieces for the sound track. The result is a singular piece of musical artistry.
Principal Cast: Renny Arozarena (Benny Moré), Enrique Molina (Olimpio), Carlos Ever Fonseca (Angeluis), Mario Guerra (Monchy), Limara Meneses (Aida), Laura de la Uz (Irene), Kike Quiñones (Pedrito), Carlos Massola (León Arévalo), Félix Pérez (Genaro), Cheryl Zaldívar (Sofía), Marcela Morales (Natalia), Ulyk Anello (Duany), Mayra Mazorra (Benny's Mother).
Awards: Cartagena Film Festival, Best Film, Golden India Catalina; Nominated for the Oscar at the Academy Awards; Opera Prima Award, New Latin American Cinema Festival, Havana, 2006.
SHADOW OF THE HOUSE, the raw art of life
USA, 2007
Director: Allie Humenuk
Feature Documentary, 74 minutes
Shadow of the House is an intimate portrait of the Cuban-American photographer Abelardo Morell.
Morell’s life is utterly ordinary on the surface but our understanding of him deepens as layer after layer of the man and his influences are revealed: his strange and compelling journey fleeing Castro in the early sixties and then, as a teenager, growing up in New York; his life as an American family man and as a Cuban refugee, more American than Cuban, but not an American citizen; a photographer who feels safer working at home but whose career increasingly pulls him into the outside world.
Director Allie Humenuk works alone, filming and recording audio, as she follows Morell for over seven years at work, at home, and abroad. Due to an offer to publish a book, Morell returns to Cuba in 2002 for the first time since his escape in 1962. The trip pushes him to confront his past and his familial allegiances –while his parents fiercely object to his return. And, after 40 years of being stateless, Morell finally becomes an American citizen.
Through his story we see a reflection of the duality felt by many exiles -- 'I am of this place and I am not;' 'How do I integrate the past with the present?' Shadow of the House explores the intersection between these issues and Morell's particular artistic vision.
"A lot of my work, says Morell, tries to disorient you once you get invited in to something that seems normal. I like to suggest that what may be empty is not. When you feel alone, a lot more of the world comes into your space than you think."
“One of the best films I’ve seen on an artist and the artistic process.”
Bo Smith, Director of Film Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
THE LOGIC OF REMORSE
Quebec, Canada, 2007
Director : Martin Laroche
Feature Film, Drama, HD, 86 minutes.
A chillingly real situation confronts a young couple in Montreal. It belongs to the kind you will remember for years to come.
In an intelligent, economic way, director Martin Laroche conducts a pyschological examination to its ‘logical’ conclusion.
When his 5-year-old daughter is raped and murdered, Marc, a 30-something intellectual, is faced with a moral choice. While he refuses to surrender to urges of personal revenge, Marc is nevertheless tormented by the idea that the murderer, Vincent, is about to get off scot free for lack of proof. It seems that he committed the crime wearing gloves and a condom. Marc's wife Annie isn't as reticent. She decides to kill Vincent at the entrance to the courthouse. But before she can complete the deed, she stops and is arrested. Racked by remorse, she commits suicide in her cell. Marc now finds himself alone in the world, and the murderer is free. Marc remembers a book he once read about the brain and human emotions. The book explained that there was a particular region of the brain associated with feelings of remorse and compassion, and that a dysfunction in this region may explain the behaviour of serial killers. But  this kind of explanation keeps troubling him: what if he too supressed his feelings of remorse? Then Marc asks himself the key question that if God exists, his choices would have been different. And yes, they probably would have been.
Principal Cast: Antoine Touchette, Denis Faucher, Julie Vachon.
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