Documentary Series | Semester 2 2009

Film documentaries presented this semester by the department of Spanish and Latin American Studies and SURCLA - the Sydney University Research Community for Latin America.

Venue: Lecture Theatre 026, new Law School, University of Sydney
Time: 5:30pm onwards
Location - how to get there.

Click here for a printable version of this information and information on this semester's Seminar Series.

Tuesday 4 August

Mojados: Through the Night
65 mins 2005 Dir. Tommy Davis

Mojados: Through the Night is an eye-opening documentary filmed over the course of ten days that follows four men into the desperate world of illegal immigration. Alongside Bear, Tiger, Handsome, and Old Man, director Tommy Davis takes a 120 mile cross-desert journey that has been traveled innumerable times by nameless immigrants who, like these four young migrants from Michoacán, Mexico, all had the simple, American dream for a better future. Davis brings to life the often unheard hopes and stories of these migrants as their dehydrated days evading the U.S. Border Patrol turn into sub-zero nights filled with barbed wire, brutal storms and the ever-present confrontation with death that is reality for the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who make a similar journey into the United States every year.

Tuesday 18 August

Balseros
120 mins 2002 Dir. Carlos Bosch and Josep Maria Domènech

In the summer of 1994, a group of reporters from Televisió Catalunya filmed and interviewed six Cubans and their families while they prepared to undergo the risky venture of taking to the sea to reach the coast of the United States, fleeing the economic woes afflicting their country during its Special Economic Period crisis. Some time later, in a refugee camp in the US base of Guantánamo, the reporters located those who had been intercepted in the high seas. Their families remained in Cuba with no word from them, except for one woman who was washed up on her raft and was forced back by authorities. Seven years after their attempts to cross the Gulf of Florida, the Balseros team meets up again with their former film subjects to find out what has happened to them since. The film sensitively traces in great detail the changes in their lives, what has happened to those who got to the US and those who remained in Cuba. Theirs is the story of real survival in our times.

Tuesday 1 September

Nuyorican Dream
82 minutes, 2000 Dir. Laurie Collyer

Nuyorican Dream chronicles the struggles and aspirations of a New York Puerto Rican family as they contend with the devastating effects of urban poverty. The film follows Robert Torres, Marta's eldest son and the only one of his family to finish high school and college. College was supposed to lead to the American Dream, but the experience of transcending class has had the result of alienating Robert from his family. Nuyorican Dream captures harrowing images of a family in crisis. Sisters Beti and Tati struggle with devastating drug addictions, brother Danny spends half his life in prison, and mother Marta supports the entire extended family through welfare and selling homemade pasteles and used clothing on the street. What emerges most strongly about the Gutierrez family is the fierce love and support that sustains them. Nuyorican Dream is not just about "making it" in America, but about making it with the family intact.

Tuesday 15 September

The Bronze Screen
123 minutes 2003 Dir. Susan Racho, Nancy de Los Santos and Alberto Dominguez

The Bronze Screen is an engaging, entertaining, and largely untold story of the history of Latinos in the Hollywood motion picture industry. Inspiring as well as informing, it is a triumph and celebration of this rich, thriving culture that has made a major contribution to the art of motion pictures. The film shows the struggle of many gifted artists to bring a measure of reality to their screen images and transcend crudely cliched movie roles. These roles often determined how other Americans and the world viewed them, reinforced mainstream prejudices, and contributed to a poor self-image among Latino audiences. The film uses extensive film footage, much of it never seen by contemporary audiences, to trace the progression of this distorted screen image, from the early silent films to contemporary urban gang movies. It examines stereotypes such as the lazy Mexican, the Latin Lover and his female counterpart, the Dark Lady.

Tuesday 6 October | University of Sydney Postgraduate Research Students Panel

• SHORTS/CORTOS
• De Colores Peter Barbosa and Garrett Lenoir (28 min, 2001)
• De Colores is a bilingual documentary about how Latino families and communities are replacing the deep roots of homophobia with the even deeper roots of love and tolerance. Through moving personal stories, audiences learn about how families are breaking cultural barriers and how love always prevails.
• Geograf'a queer / Queer Geography – Tijuana Lasse Lau (10 min 2006)
• This documentary is the product of an artist workshop presented by Lui Velázquez in Tijuana, which sought to respond to the following in order to to find new secret ways of (re)thinking queer experiences into the public space, especially in a town crossed by a variety of migrations.
• ¿Existe una cierta lógica en la geograf'a gay?
  ¿Tenemos que volvernos nuestros propios arquitectos de vida para sostener una cultura gay?
• Is there certain logic to queer geography?
  Do we have to become our own architects of living to sustain queer culture?
• Equality and Parity II. A Statewide Action for Transgender HIV Prevention and Care (Los Angeles project for Latino/a trans women and men affected by HIV/AIDS) Geovanni López 29 mins, 2008
• The transgender population in California, made up of many Latinas and Latinos, is disproportionately burdened with extremely high rates of HIV. As a people, they struggle with issues of poverty, employment discrimination, lack of health care, stigma, transphobia and other forms of oppression. Too often they are seen and not heard. This documentary provides the opportunity to enrich the dialogue on HIV prevention and community in the context of such realities.

Tuesday 20 October

The Immigrant
90 mins, 2006 Dir. John Sheedy, David Eckenrode and John Eckenrode

El Inmigrante is a documentary film that examines the Mexican and American border crisis by telling the story of Eusebio de Haro a young Mexican migrant who was shot and killed during one of his journeys north. The film presents a distinct humanitarian focus in which story and character take precedent over policy and empiricism. Towards this end El Inmigrante examines the perspectives of a diverse cast of players in this border narrative. A cast which includes the de Haro family, the community of Brackettville, Texas where Eusebio was shot, members of vigilante border militias in Arizona, the horseback border patrol in El Paso, and migrants en route to an uncertain future in the United States.