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The Latino presence at Sundance 2008
By El Mayimbe on January 22, 2008
Yo! El Mayimbe aqui eating some lechon… Although, we couldn’t officially attend this year’s Sundance Film festival due to last minute circumstances, we still have the finger on the ball as spies have been reporting in to me on all things Latino going on at Sundance 2008. We try to keep our finger on the ball with Latino Films as we did with last year with the amazing shot-in-one-take PVC-1 that debuted at Cannes. So what’s up with Latinos at Sundance this year? Good things I hear. As the Latino identity and spectrum is across the board, so are this year’s Latino selections. For starters, Diego Luna (of Y Tu Mama Tambien fame) is one of the jurors this year. In 2006, Diego Luna first appeared at Sundance in Carlos Balado's "Solo Dios Sabe" and returned last year with "The Night Buffalo" (El Bufalo de la Noche), directed by Jorge Hernandez Aldana Luna. There are about 17 films from Latin America being screened this year. Colombia and Panama are making their debut at Sundance with director Carlos Moreno's "Perro Come Perro" (Dog Eat Dog) set in the Colombian crime world, and the coming of age story "Burgua dii Ebo" (The Wind and the Water) by Vero Bollow and the Igar Yala Collective.Others include Ricardo de Montreuil's road movie "Mancora" co-produced by Spain and Peru, and Ernesto Contreras's "Parpados Azules" (Blue Eyelids), which will be released next month in Mexico.As well, there are several films about South America being screened here this year. A documentary from France, "Stranded: I've Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains," retells one of the greatest survival stories of all time (in Spanish with English subtitles), about a Uruguay rugby team that boarded a plane in October 1972 for a match they would never play. Their plane crashed in the Andes, but miraculously, 16 of the 45 passengers managed to stay alive on a frozen glacier for 72 days. Canadian film "Les Femmes de la Brukman" (The Women of Brukman) follows the struggles of women workers in Argentina to reopen a men's suit factory after the owner disappears in the wake of a national economic meltdown.So what’s going on in the American Latino side? On that same note, what American Latino film seems to be causing all the noise?
A New York American Latino filmmaker, Alex Rivera has his film SLEEP DEALER competing against 15 others in the dramatic competition. Brooklyn is in the house! I’ve known about Rivera for years from his short films. From what I’m hearing from my online colleagues, SLEEP DEALER is certainly the film that got all the sci-fi geeks buzzing. A sci-fi film set in Mexico, It reminds a lot of people of George Lucas’ first movie THX-1138 with a bit of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Darren Aronofsky’s Pi thrown in for good measure. The no budget sci-fi/political film has over 450 special effects shots! Alex Rivera’s first feature, Sleep Dealer, is set in a near future marked by airtight internationalborders, militarized corporate warriors, and an underground class of node workers who plug their nervous systems into a global computer network that commodifies memory. Memo Cruz is a young campesino who lives with his family in a town fighting for its life, the small, dusty farm village of Santa Ana del Rio, Oaxaca. A private company has hijacked control of the area’s water supply and is selling it back to the village at outrageous prices, provoking the mobilization of aqua-terrorist cells. But Memo couldn’t care less about Santa Ana. He loves technology and dreams ofleaving his small pueblo to find work in the hi-tech factories of the big cities in the north. He dreams ofbecoming a node worker and learns how to build his own transmitter, which he uses to hack into the lives of others and live vicariously. One night, he stumbles across a transmission destined to pave the way to the city of the future, but in a way Memo could never have expected.So there you have it. Stay tuned as we track these films and their progress as they journey through the festival market. HASTA EL PROXIMO CAPITULO… …YO SOY EL MAYIMBE!
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