South America
graham.rickson
The opening shot sets the tone for what follows: a pair of duelling cockroaches attached to a string, tormented by a bored child. In 1953’s The Wages of Fear, we quickly sense that Henri-Georges Clouzot’s characters are similarly powerless. His multi-national misfits, marooned in an unnamed South American town, are effectively prisoners, scrabbling around for the money with which to escape a place which is “like a prison: easy to get in, impossible to get out”. The film’s exposition is overlong, but creates a sense of oppressive dread.As with Hitchcock’s The Birds, the leisurely first act Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There is a South American theme to Rambert’s latest triple bill, two new commissions made to chime with an oldie but goldie, the rhythms of Latin social dances linking all three.Ghost Dances is, I'm told, the most requested work in the company’s 90-year history, but it must have made a very different impression on its first airing. It was made in 1981 at the prompting of the Chilean Human Rights Committee, determined that the world should know about the 35,000 people murdered, and many more imprisoned and tortured, in the wake of General Pinochet’s bloody coup. Christopher Bruce, moved by Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s a close, steamy evening in Panama City. A short walk out of the Casco Viejo, or old quarter, leads to the coastal belt – a rush of highway with an accompanying, exhaust-flogged pedestrian walkway that hugs the Bay of Panama. It’s an inauspicious route, too close to traffic and the pungent smells of the city’s fish market, but I’m drawn towards the far-off sounds of an unlikely cinema congregation.The Mirador del Pacífico is a recently created breakwater that protects a vast recreation area, which tonight has a vibe one part film festival, one part music festival and one part family Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Chilean director Pablo Larrain has described Neruda as a “false biopic”, and it’s a film that surprises on many levels in its presentation of Pablo Neruda, the great poet who is his country’s best-known cultural figure. It captivates for the scope of its invention, its ludic combination of reality and artifice, poetry and politics, as well as the contradictions of its central character.Larrain's last film Jackie was also a biopic with a difference, but Neruda goes further in every sense. It’s also something of a departure from the director’s earlier works, such as No and Post Mortem, which Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Percy Fawcett: does the name ring a bell? He ought by rights to sit in the pantheon of boys’ own explorers alongside Cook and Ross, Parry and Franklin, Livingstone and Mungo Park, Scott and Shackleton. Either side of the Great War, he returned again and again to the impenetrable South American interior, in pursuit of an ancient Amazonian civilisation which he called Z.That he’s not quite a household name is partly down to reasons it would be unfair to reveal here. His story, told in a 2009 book by David Grann called The Lost City of Z, has now been streamlined into a film which inherits the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is psychohistory: an attempt to heal Alejandro Jodorowsky’s turbulent Forties youth by reimagining it. The 88-year-old director of the acid Western El Topo, which was loved by John Lennon, still plans a sequel to that surreal, midnight movie favourite of hippie New York, so Endless Poetry isn’t necessarily his last act. Itself a sequel to The Dance of Reality’s lovely evocation of his Chilean childhood, it again generously comes to terms with his past. It’s a good spell to go into the night with.Resuming straight after The Dance of Reality, we return to young Alejandro’s family as they Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Latin America has learnt from harsh experience just what the legacy of dictatorship involves, when the structure itself may have been dismantled but the psychology that it engendered remains. It’s a subject that has been tackled by many of the continent’s filmmakers, prime among them perhaps Pablo Larrain in Chile, for whom such explorations have themselves become part of the slow process of moving on from that past.The Clan has Argentina's Pablo Trapero dramatising a real-life story from the 1980s that is as chilling as they come, while the manner in which he approaches it only underlines Read more ...
mark.kidel
The jungle, a region of Edenic fantasy and unspeakable terrors, has always fed the white man’s imagination as well as kindled his greed. Not surprisingly, this is rich ground for the movies – a place beyond time, the home of noble savages and an El Dorado to be stripped of its riches. In most jungle movies, including The Mission and The Emerald Forest, the indigenous population is romanced or demonised, or a mixture of both. Werner Herzog, with Aguirre, God of Wrath and Fitzcarraldo, managed to temper the exoticism that tends to colour the outsider’s view of nature untouched and cultures Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Another splendidly eclectic globalist radio show hosted by Peter Culshaw. The show's featured album of the month is the impeccable The Woman at The End Of The World by the veteran Brazilian songstress Elza Soares. We have remixed desert blues, Pakistani film jazz, Romanian brass mayhem, avant folk from Ukraine and a track from what promises to be the hit world music album of the summer - Calypso Rose’s Far From Home. Not to mention a world exclusive preview of Susheela Raman’s new album (a gamelan reworking of the Beatles psychedelic classic "Tomorrow Never Knows"). To listen Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Chilean director Pablo Larrain completed his loose trilogy about his country confronting the legacy of its Pinochet years four years ago with No. Striking a distinctly upbeat note after the two films that had preceded it, Tony Romero and Post Mortem, its title came from the unexpected referendum result that deprived the dictator of an anticipated extension of his mandate, and was seen through the story of the advertising men behind that epoch-changing vote.But new times do not bring new morals. His new film The Club (El Club), which took the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Berlinale, may Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Actor and director Simon McBurney’s one-man Complicite show has arrived in London after gathering plaudits in Edinburgh and elsewhere last year – before setting off again on a nationwide and European tour. It’s the story of a much more adventurous journey, which took place in 1969 when Loren McIntyre, a photographer for National Geographic magazine, got lost in the Amazonian rainforest while seeking the Mayoruna tribe, the “cat people”. Although he made contact with them, he found himself suddenly completely dependent on their good will.It’s a situation that immediately suggests the question Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Listen to the latest edition of Peter Culshaw’s peripatetic round-up of some recent hot global music releases, including some re-releases of old classics and yet-to-be unleashed tracks including a fair chunk from South America. For your listening pleasure, there are some delicious Afro-Colombian grooves, psychedelic cumbia, new Peruvian sounds and up-and-coming Brazilian artists plus the odd side trip with some Arabic Rock, Welsh-Indian fusion and South Asian violin virtuosity.. Listen to the show here Tracklisting:Temple Of Light “The Rose and the Fire are One”Amara Touré Read more ...