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This sensual, exuberant work by the gifted Mexican director Maria Novaro tells the story of Julia (Maria Rojo), a 40-year-old telephone operator and single mother whose emotional life consists only of the danzon, a weekly ballroom dance. When her dancing partner disappears, Julia undertakes a grueling odyssey to locate him. More importantly, this search sets […] |
SPANISH/LATIN CINEMA
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The 1957 short La Cravate (Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film) re-imagines Georges Méliès for a post-Marcel Marceau world, reproducing the former’s cinematic trickery in pantomime, for a goofily allegorical story about people who get fitted for new heads. |
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The rarely screened feature film debut of the eccentric visionary Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre). In an outrageous, sometimes supremely absurd manner, Jodorowsky tells the story (based on a play by Fernando Arrabal) of impotent Fando and paralyzed Lis as they travel in search of the enchanted city of Tar. On […] |
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Alejandro Jodorowsky’s big budget follow-up to El Topo is even more esoteric and carnivalesque than its predecessor. The sprawling narrative begins with a Christ-like thief trying to steal the secret of enlightenment from an alchemist (Jodorowsky), and then devolves into a succession of psychedelic vignettes, shocking iconography, alchemical set pieces, fascistic mass movements, and Brechtian […] |
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The original midnight movie. Alejandro Jodorowsky brought his avant-garde theater aesthetics to the table with this ultraviolent western about a lone gunman, El Topo , who banishes his son and sets off on a spiritual quest to defeat four quick-draw masters, only to be struck down by his own son after years of solitude. Countercultural […] |
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Playwright, novelist, poet, filmmaker and provocateur Fernando Arrabal has both confounded and delighted audiences with his blasphemous and outrageous cinematic works. The Guernica Tree chronicles the depravity and violence that occurred under Franco’s tyrannical regime. “Beautiful as a song coming from the origin of time, melancholic and violent” (Le Monde). |
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Love, death, sainthood and murder figure in this French film by Spanish director Fernan Arrabal, better known for his film Viva La Muerte. Aden Rey (George Shannon) is an epileptic boy whose life has been stunted by the heavy religiosity and repressiveness of his mother (Emmanuele Riva), who has had numerous lovers. When she is […] |
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This is an extremely violent, gory, and surreal meditation on the life of a young lad during the time of the Spanish Civil War, as he attempts to find out what happened to his father, who has disappeared. It turns out that his mother, devout in her loyalty to the Falange, has turned him in […] |