As is already very well known in our community, the Spanish section of the Department of Foreign Languages and Humanities each semester presents the Hispanic Film Series. We show four Hispanic movies to offer to our students and to all others interested in Spanish language and Hispanic Culture the chance to practice their Spanish and learn about Hispanic cultures while viewing the most popular recent Hispanic movies.
Habana Blues
Benito Zambrano, Cuba
Habana Blues (Havana Blues) is a Spanish and Cuban film by Benito Zambrano, which tells the story of two young musicians in Cuba. The film revolves around their music and contains criticism of problems in Cuba such as poverty and electricity outages. The two musicians, Ruy and Tito, whose music is a mix of traditional Cuban music and more modern music such as rap, get a chance at an international breakthrough through a Spanish record company, but they would have to change their Cuba-themed lyrics to cater to an international audience. Ruy considers this a betrayal of his country and his art, whereas Tito recognizes the financial necessity of it
Wednesday, March 19
De Eso No Se Habla ( I Don't Want to Talk About It)
Maria Luisa Bemberg, Argentina
*This Film will be shown in Library 128 this day only
On her daughter's second birthday, Leonor (Luisina Brando) comes to terms with a fact central to the girl's life. Her daughter is a dwarf, which causes Leonor to make a covert nighttime visit to her neighbor's garden. There, she destroys ornamental statues with elfin shapes. Back home, she burns copies of "Gulliver's Travels," "Thumbelina" and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
"I Don't Want to Talk About It” is a stately, haunting fable. It describes what happens when the daughter, Carlotita, grows up. Dedicating her film "to all the people who have the courage to be different in order to be themselves," Ms. Bemberg tells this strange story as an extended metaphor and turns it into an unlikely romance.
Thursday, April 3
Hombres armados (Men With Guns)
John Sayles (Estados Unidos)
Despite a title that seems to promise an action / thriller, "Men With Guns" is a deliberately paced road movie about an honest but insulated man's search for truth. "Men With Guns" is self-consciously mythic in tone and scope, though the social conditions it depicts are realistically rendered. It begins with a clairvoyant Indian woman in an unnamed Latin American country telling her young daughter that an aged white man from the big city - the honest but insulated seeker - will soon arrive in their dirt poor mountain village. It ends with a symbolic passing of the torch from the visitor, a physician, to a younger man.
Wednesday, April 30
Fresa y Chocolate
Tomás Gutiérrez Aléa (Cuba)
In Tomas Gutierrez Alea's "Strawberry and Chocolate," set in 1979, Cuban life is so ingrained with politics, and you’re implicated no matter what you do. Raising a glass of Johnny Walker, for instance, is sampling the drink of the enemy. Not reporting suspicious goings-on to the authorities is grounds for arrest. As for being gay, it's taboo politically and culturally.
So when David (Vladimir Cruz), a student-ideologue, and Diego (Jorge Perrugoria), a homosexual art aficionado, encounter each other at an outdoor cafe, their differences couldn't be more dramatically drawn. Their flowering friendship amounts to humanistic subversion.
When Diego lures humorless, extremely wary David into his apartment on a pretext, it's clearly an attempted seduction. What David discovers -- beyond Diego's obvious, initial intentions -- is a sight for repressive eyes: photographs of artists, books by Dostoevski and Cervantes, music by Callas -- the whole cultural gateway to the free/bourgeois world. Diego's place is also crowded with religious statues, the work of a friend, which he wants to exhibit at a gallery. Unfortunately, he tells David, he is encountering resistance from the authorities.
