FILMS/
AL MáS ALLá
Tributes
USA, 2008, 43 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Fri, Apr 24 / 7:00 / PFA / ALMA24P
Mon, Apr 27 / 7:00 / Kabuki / AWAR27K
CREDITS
- dir
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Lourdes Portillo
- prod
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Lourdes Portillo
- scr
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Lourdes Portillo
- cam
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Kyle Kibbe, Antonio Scarlata
- editor
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Vivien Hillgrove
- mus
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Todd Boekelheide
- cast
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Ofelia Medina, Kyle Kibbe, Jose Araujo
- source
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Xochitl Films, 981 Esmeralda Street, San Francisco, CA 94110. FAX: 415-642-1609. EMAIL: lportillo@mac.com.
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CAUSES
The Arts
GOLDEN GATE PERSISTENCE OF VISION AWARD A documentary film crew arrives at a tranquil aqua-toned beach town on Mexico’s Mayan coast, chasing the story of three fishermen who happened upon a wayward package of cocaine—flotsam from a steady narco-stream flowing up from South America en route to northern markets. The fishermen sold it to the local police chief, who warned them (in vain) not to spend their money in town and prophesied, “Whatever comes from the ocean, has to go back to the ocean.” “I think it will take a few days to nail this one down,” opines real-life sound recordist Jose Araujo to the crew’s somewhat flustered and self-important director, played by renowned Mexican actress Ofelia Medina—a delightfully arch stand-in for this sly, prodding film’s real-life director, acclaimed Bay Area–based filmmaker Lourdes Portillo. Gazing at a nearby ruin, meanwhile, Portillo’s fictional alter ego resolves, “I have to find out what this has to do with the Mayas.” A playfully serpentine, semi-fictionalized investigation of a true incident thus de-centers its ostensible subject—three fishermen who never do appear, increasingly seeming the stuff of parable—while undercutting the “heroic” pretensions of the documentary genre itself. What emerges is a rumination on globalization’s violent erasure of local culture—but also on the manufacture of stories and the circulation of “truths” as the counterparts, and uneasy accomplices, of circulating goods, services and people in a voracious economic system that leaves much more than the occasional bag of narcotics in its wake.
—Robert Avila
U.S. Premiere.
