Caribbean Film Series:
A 5th Anniversary Festival
March 14 - 17, 2019
BAMcinématek
From Thursday, March 14 through Sunday, March 17, Caribbean Film Academy, The Luminal Theater, Third Horizon, and BAM Film present Caribbean Film Series: A 5th Anniversary Festival, a four-day festival marking the five-year anniversary of the Caribbean Film Series, a platform for fresh and contemporary films from the Caribbean and its diaspora. In shorts, narrative feature films, and documentaries from Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, the U.K., and more, the series explores the thematic and aesthetic diversity of Caribbean cinema.
Cinema Tropical is proud to be a presenting partner for a number of Spanish-speaking and Latino influence films in the Festival, including the moving Puerto Rican historical sovereignty documentary 1950: The Nationalist Uprising (Davila Marichal, 2017); the Victor Jara Collective’s, The Terror and the Time (1978) and In the Sky’s Wild Noise (1983), two thorough and poetic examinations of Guyana’s colonial and political heritage, inspired by the legacy of the eponymous Chilean folk singer and dissident; and the critically-regarded Dominican crime fable Cocote (De los Santos Arias, 2017).
All screenings at:
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(718) 636-4100 / www.BAM.org/Film
1950: THE NATIONALIST UPRISING
(José Manuel Dávila Marichal, Puerto Rico, 2017, 105 min.)
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Electrifying, revealing and timely, this documentary revisits a seminal event in Puerto Rico’s history: the ten days in October 1950 when one hundred people, members of the island’s Nationalist Party, took up arms to overthrow the rule of the United States and establish Puerto Rican sovereignty. The insurgents, outnumbered and ill-equipped, were crushed by the police and the National Guard, and either killed or imprisoned. Buttressed by archival film and photographs and animated reenactments, 1950: The Nationalist Uprising presents the testimonies of five Puerto Ricans who participated in this almost forgotten struggle. They speak about the consequences of the uprising on their lives, and the ideal of freedom that burns within them still.
Preceded by AN EXCAVATION OF US (Shirley Bruno, Haiti, 2018, 11 min.)
The shadows of Napoleon’s army fall upon their boat traveling through the mysterious cave named after Marie Jeanne, a female soldier who fought in the Haitian Revolution. It is this battle inside her cave that will become the most successful slave revolution in history.
Saturday, March 16, 9:30pm
‘Dreaming to Change the World: The Films of The Victor Jara Collective’
THE TERROR AND THE TIME and IN THE SKY’S WILD NOISE
(The Victor Jara Collective, Guyana, 1978, 1983, 105 min.)
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Inspired by Chilean dissident Victor Jara, and Guyana’s connection to the Third Cinema movement, The Victor Jara Collective presents two seldom seen documentaries. The Terror and the Time (1978) focuses on the 1953 upheavals in what was then British Guiana. This documentary was essentially banned by the Guyanese government, and it would be five years before the collective made their second and final film, In the Sky’s Wild Noise (1983). A mid-length work, it features the late historian and activist Walter Rodney, author of the seminal book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. A self-styled “guerrilla intellectual” whose thinking influenced the black power movements in the US and the Caribbean, Rodney was assassinated by a car bomb in Guyana in 1980.
Q&A with Lewanne Jones of the Victor Jara Collective
Sunday, March 17, 1:30pm
COCOTE
(Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, Dominican Republic, 2017 , 106 min.)
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A rapturous crime fable set in the Dominican Republic’s Cocote follows Alberto, a kind-hearted gardener returning home to attend his father’s funeral. When he discovers that a powerful local figure is responsible for his father’s death, Alberto realizes that he’s been summoned by his family to avenge the murder. It’s an unthinkable act — especially for him, an Evangelical Christian. But as pressure mounts, he sees few ways out. Questions of faith, tradition and honor course through this electrifying film, which, seemingly at the speed of thought itself, jumps between film formats, colors, and aspect ratios, radically envisioning a community torn asunder by senseless violence.
Sunday, March 17, 4pm
