Popula Film Club: Escape and Confrontation

The AFI Silver Theater’s Latin American Film Festival takes place over four weeks in September and October, bringing audiences a sampling of great films from South and Central America and the Caribbean. It’s a great fest to check out for those who otherwise may not have access to bigger, more exclusive festival films. 

Escapism! more attractive than ever. Please enjoy getting away from the conventional, from the corpocracy, and from this week’s harrowing world.

—Soham

La Llorona (dir. Jayro Bustamante, 2019)

via AFI Silver Theater Latin American Film Festival ($12 to stream)

Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante burst onto the scene with the wryly funny, heartbreaking Ixcanul (2015). La Llorona (“The Weeping Woman”) is very loosely based on a Mesoamerican folk tale about a beautiful woman who, jilted by her cheating husband, throws her own children into the river, kills herself and is condemned to walk the earth as an ever-weeping and sometimes vengeful, evil ghost. This film was released in the same year as the American The Curse of La Llorona; Bustamante’s adaptation demonstrates the often superior value of stories told in the vernacular of their original culture. Here, he confronts Guatemala’s genocidal past through the story of a young girl, murdered by a general, whose ghost returns to torment him. While the American version relies on tawdry tricks to scare audiences, Bustamante’s is aching, filled with dread and the pain of a nation’s bloody history.

Panquiaco (dir. Ana Tejera, 2020)

via AFI Silver Theater Latin American Film Festival ($12 to stream)

Cebaldo, an indigenous man from Panama, now resides in Portugal, working as a fisherman. In Ana Tejera’s humanistic semidocumentary, she blends the real Cebaldo with fictional performances and accounts of his life and the connections he shares with Panquiaco, an ancestor who was a guide for the Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa. In an interview with Variety, Tejera mentioned that she is not interested labeling her film as ‘documentary’ or ‘fiction’ or even a hybrid of the two. Panquiaco seeks to excavate the ironies and tragedies of history, and the lineages and cultural roots that imperialism attempts to sever, but which persist in the human spirit. 

The AFI Silver Theater is the official theater of the American Film Institute, screening mainstream, art, and foreign cinema. 

In My Room (dir. Mati Diop, 2020)

(free)

The pandemic crisis has upended the lives of billions of people; it’s also helping us to realize, through disconnection from our physical surroundings, a real separation from the industrialized consumer culture that seized the world by the throat from the mid-20^th century until the plague struck. Mati Diop’s In My Room is a home movie for 2020. Made available free in partnership, somewhat weirdly, between MUBI and the Italian haute-raggers of Prada/miu miu, the film explores the various crevices and open spaces of the director’s studio apartment; evoking the sentimentality and minimalism of works like Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie, Diop weaves recordings of her relationship with her now deceased grandmother into an affectionate portrayal, showing that distance, love and memory are forever linked.

MUBI is an independent streaming website with a self-proclaimed “ruthless” approach to streaming. They present a new film each day, it lasts for 30 days, and then it goes away.

Night of the Kings (dir. Phillipe Lacôte, 2020)

Miami Film Festival ($9.99 rental, starts 10/7)

One of the most raucous and entertaining festival films of the year, Phillipe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings mixes West African mythology with Shakespearean high drama in the story of a young prisoner embroiled in power struggle. The leader of the prison, Blackbeard, is sick and dying. He wants to spill blood one last time, so on the night of the red moon, he brings in the new prisoner and assigns him to be the “Roman”—a griot, or tribal storyteller, in West African culture—who must tell the whole prison a fantastical tale. The moment the tale ends, the Roman is to be sacrificed… unless he can keep the story going until sunrise. The story he tells is of a young gang leader named Zama King. A suspenseful and exciting film with strong prose, interpretive dance routines, and a compelling mystical aura. 

Miami Film Festival is a world-class platform for international and Ibero-American films.

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The Popula Film Club brings you worthwhile options to stream, chosen with a view to quality, and to withholding as much money as possible from the oligarchs and monopolists of Amazon, Netflix, YouTube and the like.

Please send your recommendations to submissions@popula.com with the subject line, POPULA FILM CLUB.