At first glance, “Los Bastardos” seems a surprising film for a Mexican director to make.
The second movie from Amat Escalante, 30, is a disturbing fictional tale about 24 hours in the lives of two undocumented Mexican day laborers in Los Angeles.
Oscar-winning actor Benicio Del Toro has been presented with an award by the Cuban government in Havana, in recognition of his body of work, reports the BBC.
"The inaugural Tomas Gutierrez Alea prize was presented at a ceremony attended by U.S. actors Robert Duvall, James Caan and Bill Murray.
"Their visit is seen as a sign of warming Cuban-U.S. relations."
Puerto Rican-born Del Toro played the revolutionary Argentine Ernesto "Che" Guevara in two films released last year by director Steven Soderbergh.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: A still from "Che, the Argentine," in which Benicio del Toro portrays Ernesto "Che" Guevara addressing the UN General Assembly in 1964. Credit: www.cheelargentino.com/
It will be interesting to see how Sacha Baron Cohen's new movie, Brüno, is received here in Mexico when it launches in cinemas at the end of September.
In Mexico City, we have yet to see the latest effort from the British comedian, but the Miami Herald's columnist Andres Oppenheimer has -- and he's not happy.
"Its main character, an Austrian gay-model-turned-TV-reporter played by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, makes fun of almost everybody, but is particularly brutal to Mexicans. In his fictional TV talk show, Brüno invites his celebrity guests to sit on top of live men on their fours looking at the floor with a mixture of boredom and resignation. The men resemble the stereotype of Mexican laborers, mustaches included," writes Oppenheimer.
In the audio clip below, you can hear Brüno say: "Come and sit on our great furniture. These are our Mexican chair people. Demi Moore has two of them in her house.''
You might remember this post we did in June on a documentary about Nicaraguan banana-plantation workers and the Dole Food Co.
Well, in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Dole accused Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten of slander and libel in making the documentary, which was shown at last month's Los Angeles Film Festival.
The film "Bananas!" chronicles a 2007 case against Dole and prominently features L.A. attorney Juan J. Dominguez, who now faces contempt charges.
The Times' Victoria Kim reports:
In light of the judge's finding of fraud by the plaintiffs' attorneys, Dole attorneys contend in the complaint that "Bananas!" unfairly demonizes Dole and is riddled with factual inaccuracies.
Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney, in a 60-page ruling dismissing two pending lawsuits, said attorneys for the Nicaraguans engaged in a brazen scheme to recruit men who had never worked on banana plantations, train them to lie on the stand and fabricate medical evidence to back up the claims."
Read the rest of Kim's story about the Dole lawsuit here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
"One of the gentle souls in the movie business is Guillermo del Toro, and I always look forward to my interviews with him," writes Geoff Boucher on our Hero Complex blog.
Boucher wrote about Mexican fiction mastermind Del Toro in today's Calendar section, and an extended version of the article runs on the blog.
On the far side of the globe, in New Zealand, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is now in his seventh month of labor on “The Hobbit,” a $300-million epic that will be told over two films in 2011 and 2012. But you can also find the Guadalajara native on the shelf of your local bookstore with his just-released debut novel, “The Strain,” the opening installment of a vampire trilogy he already has mapped out.
That’s only the beginning. The 44-year-old Del Toro, who was nominated for an Oscar for the dark fairy tale “Pan’s Labyrinth” and showed his crowd-pleasing sensibilities with the “Hellboy” films, also has plans to reanimate some musty and monstrous literary classics. He plans to make a “Frankenstein” film as well as an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s epic “At the Mountains of Madness,” a project he breathlessly refers to as "my obsession."
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
"Los Que Se Quedan" (Those Who Remain), a film made by Mexican directors Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman, gets another look, this time from Patrick J. McDonnell, due to its presence at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
You may remember our video and report about the film from earlier this year, when it was showing at the Guadalajara Film Festival in Mexico and scooped the prize for best Mexican documentary. You can watch an interview with the two directors in the video above.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Video by Deborah Bonello
The reunion of Aleida Gallangos with her long-lost brother Lucio is a long and painful story. The two siblings were separated in Mexico after their parents and uncle were "disappeared" during the country's dirty war in the 1970s.
The Times' Richard Boudreaux reported in January 2005:
"In a rare story of closure to the conflict, Gallangos traced her brother to Washington, D.C., found him living under the name Juan Carlos Hernandez, and convinced him of his identity, making the immigrant construction worker the first of Mexico's more than 500 desaparecidos, the disappeared ones, to be found alive since the "dirty war."
Aleida's search for and reunion with her brother was documented by the filmmaker Christiane Burkhard over a series of years. The result of that project -- the documentary "Tracing Aleida" -- is showing in theaters across Mexico and is out on DVD in the United States.
We visited the German director in her Mexico City home to talk about the process of making the film.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
"L.A. audiences would seem to need no introduction to Mexican cinema. The city has the nation's largest Mexican American population, it's the adopted home of many of Mexico's leading actors, directors, cinematographers and designers, and there are numerous venues and festivals here that regularly screen Mexican films,'' reports Reed Johnson.
"But in bringing his Hola Mexico Film Festival (which kicks off today) to Los Angeles for the first time, Samuel Douek wants to show U.S. audiences that Mexican cinema continues to thrive, several years after international breakout hits such as 'Amores Perros' and 'Y Tu Mamá También' ushered in a new wave of Mexican movie creativity," Johnson adds.
You can read the rest of Johnson's report here, and sit back and enjoy the trailers for some of the films in this year's festival below. See more posts about film on La Plaza here, and sign up at the festival's Facebook page for updates.
Filmmaker fascination with the violent Mara Salvatrucha street gangs continues, and this time it's a Web fiction series that's garnering attention.
"The Ten Commandments of la Vida Loca, " a Web series of short fiction films that tell the story of two brothers who decide to join the Mara Salvatrucha, will receive the Webby Award for best drama series during a ceremony in New York this evening. You will be able to see clips of the event on the Webby Awards YouTube channel.
The fiction series was funded by Filmaka, an online global creative organization that focuses on "inspiring and rewarding creativity and talent by providing professional opportunities for directors and writers all around the world," according to its website.
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