Cine Latino, the U.S. Latinx and Latin American film festival presented by the Minneapolis St. Paul Film Society has announced the first-ever retrospective of award-winning Mexican-American director, screenwriter, and producer Rodrigo Reyes to take place October 15-22 as part of its 8th annual edition.
Named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine, Reyes was the recipient of the 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow at MacDowell Colony, the 2017 National Mediamaker Fellowship by the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), the Spotlight on Storytellers Award from the Sundance Institute, as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship and Creative Capital Award.
Reyes’ work has screened in over 50 film festivals around the world, and has received the support of Tribeca Film Institute, Sundance Institute, California Humanities Council, Film Independent, IFP Narrative and Documentary Labs, the Berkeley Film Foundation, the Bay Area Video Coalition, the Mexican Film Institute, and ITVS Open Call.
Purgatorio (2013)
The film retrospective will showcase Reyes’ three feature films: Purgatorio: A Journey Into the Heart of the Border (2013), Lupe Under the Sun (2016), and his most recent film 499 (2020), winner of the Best Cinematography Award at the Tribeca Film Festival and the Hot Docs Special Jury Prize for International Feature Documentary, plus the short film Abuelos (2020).
Additionally, members of Reyes’s creative team, acclaimed film critics, guest programmers, film funders and scholars will join the retrospective for special conversation during the festival to celebrate his deeply moving, insightful and uncompromising cinematic voice.
In Purgatorio, director Reyes takes a fresh look at the border between Mexico and the US, focusing on the striking imagery of the place and the people who play out their roles there, much like characters in a theater of cruelty. Boldly leaving politics aside, he gives a voice to aspiring immigrants, an American coroner, a religious man who leaves water and food in the desert, the souls living and dying in border towns, and even a Minuteman going about his business of foiling the people trying to cross. Putting the physical presence and brutal beauty of the border itself front and center, Purgatorio re-imagines it as a mythical place comparable to purgatory as described by Dante.
Lupe Under the Sun, winner of Film Independent’s Canon Filmmaker Award, is a neorealist film following an aging migrant worker living in California, who longs to return to Mexico before it is too late. Featuring a cast of nonprofessional actors, real farmworkers and authentic locations, the film tackles issues of depression, homesickness and the immigrant myth of the American Dream.
499 (2020)
The hybrid documentary 499 follows a dazed, time-tripping conquistador (Eduardo San Juan Breña) who, shipwrecked and washed ashore almost five-hundred years after the first landing of the Spanish fleets, finds himself retracing Cortés's infamous journey from the beaches of Veracruz to Tenochtitlan, the heart of the Aztec Empire, and across a land plagued by the violent effects of colonialism’s destructive force on this powerful mix of magical realism and unforgettable testimonials.
Abuelos tells the story of a young girl dreams of meeting her grandmother for the first time., separated by years of immigration policy. Thanks to the bi-national cooperation of governments on both sides of the US/Mexico border, her grandmother embarks on a once-in-a-lifetime journey to reunite with her undocumented loved ones.
For complete information and tickets visit: www.mspfilm.org/festivals/cine-latino
