GABRIEL AND THE MOUNTAIN
(Gabriel e a Montanha, Brazil/France, 131 min. In Portuguese, English, and French with English subtitles)

Based on the true story of a close friend of director Fellipe Barbosa, this beautifully photographed travelogue recreates the fateful journey of a young Brazilian. Before going to the U.S. for university, Gabriel embarks on a voyage across the globe and finds himself in West Africa, where he reaches his final destination at Mount Malawi. This thrilling mix of fictional recreation and documentary reality poses provocative questions about big issues, and refuses easy answers. A Strand Releasing release

Official Selection: Critics’ Week, Cannes Film Festival

Now playing at
Quad Cinema in New York City
Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles

WOMEN OF THE VENEZUELAN CHAOS
(Margarita Cadenas, Venezuela/France, 2017, 83 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)

Embodying strength and stoicism, five Venezuelan women from diverse backgrounds each draw a portrait of their country as it suffers under the worst crisis in its history amid extreme food and medicine shortages, a broken justice system, and widespread fear. The women share what life is really like for them and their families as the truth of the country’s difficulties are repeatedly denied by the government. Featuring stunning visuals and creative soundscapes, Women of the Venezuelan Chaos presents a uniquely beautiful country and people, who remain resilient and resourceful despite the immense challenges they face.

Friday, June 15, 9:15pm — IFC Center
Screening followed by discussion with filmmaker Margarita Cadenas and Tamara Taraciuk Broner, Senior Americas Researcher, HRW

Saturday, June 16, 3:30pm — Film Society of Lincoln Center
Screening followed by discussion with filmmaker Margarita Cadenas and Tamara Taraciuk Broner, Senior Americas Researcher, HRW
 

VOICES OF THE SEA
(Kim Hopkins, USA/Cuba, 2018, 99 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)

In this tiny, remote Cuban fishing village, Mariela, a mother of four young children, longs for a better life. The families in her village are utterly dependent on the day’s catch, which changes with the tide. The shops are empty, school is repeatedly shut down due to a lack of resources, and basic transportation is non-existent. With the relationship between the US and Cuba in flux, Mariela, like many Cubans, is afraid that her only chance to escape to the US will soon close. Her husband, Pita, loves his community, cherishes his friendships, and is loyal to his craft as a fisherman. The tension between husband and wife—one desperate to leave, the other content to stay—builds further after her brother and neighbors flee the country, risking their lives to chase the American Dream.

June 15, 6:30pm — Film Society of Lincoln Center
Screening followed by discussion with filmmaker Kim Hopkins

June 17, 8:45pm — IFC Center
Screening followed by discussion with filmmaker Kim Hopkins

En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day) is a fiction feature from director Jim McKay (Girls Town, Our Song, Everyday People) which follows a group of undocumented immigrants living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn over the course of seven days. 

Bicycle delivery guys, construction workers, dishwashers, deli workers, and cotton candy vendors, they work long hours six days a week and then savor their day of rest on Sundays on the soccer fields of Sunset Park. José, a bicycle delivery worker, is the team's captain - young, talented, hardworking and responsible. When José's team makes it to the finals, he and his teammates are thrilled. But his boss throws a wrench into the celebration when he tells José he has to work on Sunday, the day of the finals. José tries to reason with his boss or replace himself, but his efforts fail. If he doesn't work on Sunday, his job and his future will be on the line. But if he doesn't stand up for himself and his teammates, his dignity will be crushed. 

Shot in the neighborhoods of Sunset Park, Park Slope, and Gowanus, En el Séptimo Día is a humane, sensitive, and humorous window into a world rarely seen. The film’s impact is made quietly, with restraint and respect for the individual experiences, everyday challenges, and small triumphs of its characters. 

Now playing at
IFC Center in New York City
The Roxie in San Francisco

A film by Cecilia Atán and Valeria Pivato
(Argentina/Chile, 2017, 78 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)

54-year-old Teresa has worked for decades as a live-in maid with a family in Buenos Aires. When the family sells the house, she is forced to take a job in the distant town of San Juan. Although feeling uncomfortable with traveling, she embarks on a journey through the desert. During her first stop, in the land of the miraculous “Saint Correa”, she loses her bag with all her belongings. This unexpected incident leads her to cross paths with El Gringo, a traveling salesman and the only person who can help Teresa find her bag. What seemed like the end of her world will ultimately prove her salvation.

Now Playing!

 IFC Center
323 Sixth Avenue (at West 3rd Street)
(212) 924-7771 / Buy tickets in advance

Laemmle Royal Theatre
11523 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, CA
(310) 478-3836 / Buy tickets in advance

Laemmle Playhouse 7
673 East Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA
(310) 478-3836 / Buy tickets in advance 

ZAMA
(Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Brazil/Spain, 2017, 115 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)

Zama, an officer of the Spanish Crown born in South America, waits for a letter from the King granting him a transfer from the town in which he is stagnating, to a better place. His situation is delicate. He must ensure that nothing overshadows his transfer. He is forced to accept submissively every task entrusted to him by successive Governors who come and go as he stays behind. The years go by and the letter from the King never arrives. When Zama notices everything is lost, he joins a party of soldiers that go after a dangerous bandit.

“Beautiful, hypnotic, mysterious and elliptical”
—Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Opens Friday, April 13
Film Society of Lincoln Center and IFC Center in New York City
Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago

March 21 - 25
Presented by the Hanson Film Institute
and Cinema Tropical

Established in Tucson by the UA Hanson Film Institute in 2004, Tucson Cine Mexico (TCM) is the longest-running festival of contemporary Mexican cinema in the United States, and has become a vital platform for the screening of Mexican films in this country. The festival is free and promoted bilingually, and regularly attracts a diverse audience. Since its inception, Tucson Cine Mexico has attracted more than 20,000 festival-goers and has been host to more than 40 filmmakers and industry professionals. In addition to the annual film lineup, which generally features a mix of award-winning contemporary films and documentaries, the festival encourages audience participation and education via post-screening Q&As and filmmaker panels. Tucson Cine Mexico takes place over 4-5 days each March, with occasional special event screenings at other times through the year.

Tucson Cine Mexico’s website www.tucsoncinemexico.org is the source for all festival event details and free tickets. 

Screening Information: The 2018 Tucson Cine Mexico screenings and talk will take place across four venues in Tucson including the Center for Creative Photography (1030 N Olive Rd, Tucson 85719), Fox Tucson Theatre, Harkins Tucson Spectrum 18 (5455 S Calle Santa Cruz, Tucson 85706), and the Tucson Museum of Art & Historic Block. Tickets are free and open to all. Advance tickets are now available at www.tucsoncinemexico.org. Note that tickets do not guarantee seats. Seating will be available to ticket holders on a first-come first-served basis. Patrons are encouraged to arrive early to secure seats. Subject to availability, some tickets may be available on the night.

About our sponsors: Tucson Cine Mexico 2018 acknowledges the support of the following sponsors.
Silver: Film Tucson, Topline Entertainment, Rio Nuevo, Arizona Office of Film & Digital Media. 
Bronze: La Estrella Bakery, UA College of Fine Arts, UA Department of Spanish & Portuguese, UA Office of Global Initiatives, SplitSeed Productions, Vantage West, Calle Tepa Mexican Street Grill, Guadalajara Original Grill.
WIth support from Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block, UA Institute for LGBT Studies, UA Center for Latin American Studies, UA College of Humanities, UA College of Social & Behavioral Sciences, UA Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, and Ambulante Gira de Documentales.

The third annual Neighboring Scenes, a 17-film showcase of contemporary Latin American cinema, co-presented with Cinema Tropical, is coming the Film Society of Lincoln Center, February 28-March 4.

Highlighting impressive recent productions from across the region, this selective slate of premieres exhibits the breadth of styles, techniques, and approaches employed by Latin American filmmakers today. Neighboring Scenes spans a wide geographic rang, featuring established auteurs as well as fresh talent from the international festival scene.

Opening night is the U.S. premiere of Anahí Berneri’s award-winning Alanis, an unflinching portrait of a young mother eking out a living as a prostitute in Buenos Aires. Unfolding over the course of three days, Berneri’s “quietly radical” (Variety) fifth film explores the challenges of urban life as an immigrant woman, and is anchored by Sofía Gala’s fearless performance. Closing out the weekend is the world premiere of a new restoration of Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes (1998), celebrating its 20th anniversary. Bruno Stagnaro and Adrián Caetano’s landmark film, which follows a pair of less than talented thieves, launched the New Argentine Cinema movement and has continued inspiring Latin American filmmakers for generations.

Other highlights in this year’s lineup include such festival favorites as Niles Atallah’s formally daring Rey, which won the Special Jury Prize at Rotterdam; Santiago Mitre’s political thriller The Summit, an Un Certain Regard selection from Cannes, featuring an impressive international cast; and Fellipe Barbosa’s around-the-world travelogue Gabriel and the Mountain, a two-time prizewinner at Cannes Critics’ Week. The festival also features documentaries about Mexican fishermen, showgirls of the ’70s and ’80s, and the colonialist history of Easter Island; adaptations of Dostoevsky (António, One, Two, Three) and Hans Christian Andersen (The Little Match Girl); and a number of debut features including visual artist Adrián Villar Rojas’s The Theater of Disappearance, acinematic reimagining of his acclaimed Met rooftop installation.

Organized by Carlos A. Gutiérrez and Cecilia Barrionuevo. 

Doc Fortnight 2018: MoMA’s International Festival
of Nonfiction Film and Media

February 15–26
The Museum of Modern Art

Latin American Films Presented by Cinema Tropical

Doc Fortnight, MoMA’s annual international festival of nonfiction film, returns for its 17th year with 12 days of innovative approaches to documentary filmmaking. Featuring a diverse assortment of features and short films from across the globe, the festival continues to highlight the vibrant and varied styles of independent filmmakers—both emerging and established—around the world.

LA SOLEDAD
(Jorge Thielen Armand, Venezuela/Canada/Italy, 2016, 100 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Winner Best First Film – Cinema Tropical Awards
Co-presented with the Venezuelan Film Festival of New York (VEFFNY).
In a hypnotic blend of fiction and a documentary-like style, Jorge Thielen Armand looks beyond the headlines and gives a voice to those affected by contemporary Venezuela’s inner turmoil. La Soledad follows José, a young father who discovers that the dilapidated mansion he squats will soon be demolished. Desperate to save his family from homelessness, José embarks on a mystical search for a cursed treasure that is rumored to be buried in the house. Based on the filmmaker’s family and childhood home, most of the characters are played by his real friends and family members. Thielen Armand’s lyrical debut feature offers a poignant allegory of the desperate reality of today's Venezuela.
Friday, February 2, 7pm – Q&A with filmmaker

ADRIANA’S PACT
(El pacto de Adriana, Lissette Orozco. Chile, 2017, 96 min. New York premiere. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Special Jury Mention – Cinema Tropical Awards
Adriana was always director Lissette Orozco's favorite aunt. A confident woman who had settled in Australia, one day in 2007 she is suddenly arrested while visiting her family in Chile and accused of having worked for dictator Pinochet’s notorious secret police, DINA. As the aunt denies these accusations, her niece sets out to investigate Adriana’s history, managing the tough balancing act of maintaining her role as both niece and filmmaker. “Raw and compelling… a brave documentary” (Jay Weissberg, Variety), Lissette Orozco’s extremely personal debut feature is a riveting personal journey that serves as a timely account of lies and self-deception, both within a family and a nation.
Saturday, February 3, 2pm

MEMORIES OF A PENITENT HEART
(Cecilia Aldarondo. USA/Puerto Rico, 2016, 74 min. In English and Spanish with English subtitles)
Winner Best U.S. Latino Film – Cinema Tropical Awards
Combining a wealth of newly discovered home movies, video, and written documents with artfully shot contemporary interviews and vérité footage, Memories of a Penitent Heart is a documentary that cracks open a Pandora’s box of unresolved family drama. Originating from filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo’s suspicion that there was something ugly in her family’s past, the film charts her excavation of the buried family conflict around her uncle Miguel’s death, and her search for Miguel’s partner Robert a generation later. After two years of dead ends, Robert turns up: but he is not the same man. He has reinvented himself as Father Aquin, a Franciscan monk with 25 years of pent-up grief and bitterness. For the first time, a member of Miguel’s family wants to hear Aquin’s side of the story—but is it too little, too late? A story about the mistakes of the past and the second chances of the present, Memories of a Penitent Heart is a cautionary tale about the unresolved conflicts wrought by AIDS, and a nuanced exploration of how faith is used and abused in times of crisis.
Saturday, February 3, 4pm – Q&A with filmmaker

ARABY
(Arábia, Affonso Uchoa, João Dumans. Brazil, 98 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
Winner, Best Film – Cinema Tropical Awards
Andre, a teenager, lives in an industrial town in Brazil near an old aluminum factory. One day, a factory worker, Cristiano, suffers an accident. Asked to go to Cristiano’s house to pick up clothes and documents, Andre stumbles upon a notebook, and it is here that Araby begins—or, rather, transforms. As Andre reads from the journal entries, we are plunged into Cristiano’s life, into stories of his wanderings, adventures, and loves. "An instant classic… [m]arked by boundless humanism" (Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter) and beautifully written and filmed, Araby is a fable-like road movie about a young man who sets off on a twenty-year journey in search of a better life. A Grasshopper Film release.
Sunday, February 4, 3pm

THE HUMAN SURGE
(El auge del humano, Eduardo Williams. Argentina/Portugal/Brazil, 2016, 97 min. In Spanish, Portuguese and Cebuano with English subtitles)
Winner, Best Director – Cinema Tropical Awards
Buenos Aires. Exe, 25 years old, has just lost his job and is not looking for another one. His neighbors and friends seem as odd to him as they always have. Online, he meets Alf, a boy from Mozambique who is also bored with his job and who is about to follow Archie, another boy who has run away into the jungle. Through the dense vegetation of the forest, Archie tracks ants back to their nest. One of them wanders off course and comes across Chai, a Filipina who is sitting on a giant heap of earth and about to return to her strange, beautiful home town. The mysterious, humorous ways in which their adventures connect (or don’t) fuels The Human Surge, a film about our present moment that boldly and wildly looks towards our future. Winner of the top prize in the 2016 Locarno Film Festival’s Filmmakers of the Present section, William’s audacious debut feature has been hailed as “an exhilarating, boldly paradoxical experience” (Nick Pinkerton, Artforum). A Grasshopper Film release.
Sunday, February 4, 5pm

ELIS
(Hugo Prata, Brazil, 2016, 115 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)

Back by popular demand!
January 14, 21 & 28 at 7:30pm

The life of Elis Regina, undoubtedly the greatest Brazilian singer of all time, is told in this biopic film with energetic and pulsating rhythm. Winner of eight awards at the 2017 Brazilian Academy of Cinema Awards, including Best Actress for Andréia Horta as Elis Regina. The film tells the story of the singer from her arrival in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 19 , her rise to success and national and international recognition, until her tragic and early death.

Co-presented with Symphony Space, sponsored by the Consulate General of Brazil in New York, with additional support from Boteco Social. Presented as part of Cinema Tropical's Music+Film: Brazil series.

ANATOMY OF A MALE BALET DANCER
(David Barba and James Pellerito, USA, 2017, 83 min.)
A Retribution Media / Cinema Tropical release

Marcelo Gomes is a danceur noble: a male ballet dancer whose extraordinary technique, charismatic presence, and seemingly effortless strength make him the embodiment of the classical prince. Raised in Rio de Janeiro, the darkly handsome dancer, a principal with American Ballet Theatre since 2002, has been called the Pelé of Ballet. When not performing, rehearsing, or traveling the world as a guest artist, Gomes is at home in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen, accompanied by Lua, his dachshund. He is a delight, whether candidly discussing the positive influence of a gay uncle while he was growing up, the joys of particular roles, or the vicissitudes of his devotion to classical dance. Includes ravishing clips of Gomes in Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Giselle, and La Bayadère.

“Engrossing. As much a portrait of a professional athlete as a performing artist. Gomes proves an engaging subject, whose dedication is as inspiring as the breathtaking grace and strength of his dancing. An intimate study...fluidly edited and shot with an excellent eye for both the exertion and the seeming effortlessness of the dance sequences.”
– David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

A film by Carlos Lechuga
(Cuba, 2016, 105 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)

Santa & Andrés takes place in the rural mountain region of Eastern Cuba where Andrés—a noncompliant gay writer in his fifties (played by Eduardo Martinez)—resides after he has been blacklisted by the government for having “ideological problems.” After a big event occurs someone reliable must be appointed to watch over him and make sure he does not get out and make any public political statement. Santa—a country girl in her thirties who works on a farm—is assigned to the task.

For three days in a row, Santa (played by Lola Amores) will sit in front of Andrés’ hut and keep watch on him. Santa and Andrés are as close as it gets to being true opposites and are not meant to like each other. What they cannot imagine, however, is that they have more things in common than they expect.

BRIMSTONE & GLORY
Directed by Viktor Jakovlewski
(USA, 2017, 67 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)

The National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, Mexico is a site of festivity unlike any other in the world. In celebration of San Juan de Dios, patron saint of firework makers, conflagrant revelry engulfs the town for ten days. Artisans show off their technical virtuosity, up-and-comers create their own rowdy, lo-fi combustibles, and dozens of teams build larger-than- life papier-mâché bulls to parade into the town square, adorned with fireworks that blow up in all directions.

More than three quarters of Tultepec’s residents work in pyrotechnics, making the festival more than revelry for revelry’s sake. It is a celebration that anchors a way of life built around a generations-old, homegrown business of making fireworks by hand. For the people of Tultepec, the National Pyrotechnic Festival is explosive celebration, unrestrained delight and real peril. Plunging headlong into the fire, Brimstone & Glory honors the spirit of Tultepec’s community and celebrates celebration itself.

Edited by Affonso Gonçalves and scored by Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin, the creative team of Beasts of the Southern Wild.