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LAP Films

Disappearing into the Distance Two Latin American City Symphonies (film review)

By: Kristi M. Wilson In Oblivion, the award-winning Dutch-Peruvian filmmaker Heddy Honigmann (Forever, Metal and Melancholy, O Amor Natural) visits her birthplace to record the stories of everyday Peruvians under Alan García’s second presidency (2006–2011). Her camera appears to float or wander at the street level, pausing on occasion to drop in upon the lives of the people it encounters there. Andrea Prates and Cleisson Vidal’s Dino Cazzola is at once a family history, a story of migration, a story of power and national identity, and an homage to filmmaking. Both films recall the Russian director Dziga Vertov’s 1929 classic documentary Man with a Movie Camera in that they are city symphonies, films that produce complex truths about a particular urban space by weaving together images and narrative fragments from the lives of its longtime residents. At the start of Dino Cazzola: A Filmography of Brasília, close-ups of filmstrips from Cazzola’s extensive archive with dates and bits of tape on them play across the screen (Figure 1), letting us know that this documentary will address the sometimes tedious but usually surprising process of digging through archival material and that it will be self-reflexive. As in the case of Man with [...]

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On the Decay of the Art of Going to the Movies (film review)

By: Oscar Moralde   By: Kristi M. Wilson In their imaginations they saw the cinema as a total and complete representation of reality; they saw in a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief. —Andre Bazin It is in the nature of analogical worlds to provoke a yearning for the past. . . . The digital will wants to change the world. —D. N. Rodowick La vida útil is simultaneously a cinephile’s dream picture, in its stylized look back at the history of cinema, and a biting satire about the fact that in the digital age of reproduction even the art of filmmaking has lost its aura. Uruguayan film buffs will recognize the film enthusiast and regular film festival patron Jorge Jellinek as the film’s central protagonist, Jorge, and the legendary film critic and real-life Cinemateca director Manuel Martínez Carril as a version of himself. Veiroj’s film captures the dying urban experience of going to the neighborhood movie theater—a collective encounter with celluloid and film history that, all over the world, is slowly but surely being replaced by private, digital, on-demand, and Hollywood multiplex practices of viewing. In this dark comedy about one man’s attempt to save Montevideo’s Cinemateca, an independent theater he has [...]

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Latin American Dreaming (film review)

By: Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli Paraíso for Sale, directed by Anayansi Prado (also the director of Maid in America, 2005, and Children in No Man’s Land, 2008), treats the topic of Canadian and American retirees’ looking to stretch their dollars, buy second homes, and unwind in the sun by relocating (often permanently) to the Caribbean. It presents ample evidence of the looting of prime real estate in the Caribbean, where international corporations disembark with billions of dollars, pressure the locals to sell their land, and entice politicians not to enforce the law or, worse, to break it. The film’s voice-over narration suggests that this residential tourism invasion is an extension of earlier incursions from the North: “The U.S. has invaded Panama before with its armies. This invasion comes armed with golf clubs and dreams of an idyllic American retirement.” The few courageous locals who, for moral or practical reasons, resist the temptation to sell their land find themselves entangled in endless litigation with corporations and their teams of lawyers. Paraiso for Sale highlights Bocas del Toro, a string of islands that, before foreigners arrived to develop resorts and displace native populations, was once a small, quiet province of Panama. The film’s real-life drama centers on the following principal characters: Dario Vanhorne, an Afro-Panamanian tour [...]

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Corazón de fábrica Heart of the Factory (featured film)

Despite the widespread perception of a turnaround in the Argentine economy in recent years and the institutionalization of popular movements, an ongoing workers’ struggle to lift local factories out of bankruptcy continues to inspire sectors of the Argentine population. Virna Molina and Ernesto Ardito’s Corazón de fábrica (Heart of the Factory, 2008) is not only a revealing account of workers’ reactions to the economic meltdown of 2001 but a multifaceted meditation on the political principles involved in the reorganization of a ceramic factory in the southern province of Neuquén. Corazón de fábrica attests to the pernicious impact that neoliberal policies have had on Argentine families, affecting every aspect of their lives: education, health, transportation, and, primarily, employment. The film centers on a popular uprising of workers at the privately owned Zanón ceramic tile factory who resisted eviction when the factory closed its doors in the midst of the economic crisis. The workers appropriated the factory, created a cooperative, and renamed the company Fábrica sin Patrones (Factory without Bosses—FASINPAT). The long opening sequence, which features a group of schoolchildren observing the process of production, serves as an allegory for the mixing of earth and labor to create goods for the community. It is a rousing sequence, full of hope for the workers’ aspirations of rebuilding the country’s [...]

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Latin American Perspectives, founded in 1974, is a theoretical and scholarly journal for discussion and debate on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas. Most issues focus on a single problem, nation, or region, providing an in-depth look from participants and scholars throughout the Americas.

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Alfredo Saad Filho — "SOAS, University of London" “Latin American Perspectives is the most important resource available providing in-depth progressive analyses of developments in Latin America. It is the unmissable Journal!”
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