Life Kills

Appalachian Journey is one of five films made from footage that Alan Lomax shot between 1978 and 1985 for the PBS American Patchwork series (1991). It offers songs, dances, stories, and religious rituals of the Southern Appalachians. Preachers, singers, fiddlers, banjo pickers, moonshiners, cloggers, and square dancers recount the good times and the hard times of rural life there. Performers include Tommy Jarrell, Janette Carter, Ray and Stanley Hicks, Frank Proffitt Jr., Sheila Kay Adams, Nimrod Workman and Phyllis Boyens, Raymond Fairchild, and others, with a bonus of a few African-Americans from the North Carolina Piedmont.

In this deeply moving dialogue between mother and son, Mexican Tzotzil director Xun Sero confronts his past with honesty, understanding and forgiveness. Growing up without a father, he blamed his mother for the paternal absence in his life; this, for him, became his first act of violence against the feminine and his own mother. Societal pressure and shame prevented his mother from speaking about the realities of violence in her childhood and within her partnership with the director's father. Guided by the desire to understand who his mother is, Sero has created an extraordinarily sensitive first film where both mother and son open a dialogue in an attempt at self-discovery. Bravely, together, they open the door to a room of darkness and unknowns and begin to walk down a path of healing.

Echo of the Mountain takes a look at the life and work of Santos de la Torre, a great Huichol artist who, like his people, lives in oblivion. Despite having made a great mural for the metro station Palais Royal – Musée du Louvre, Santos lives isolated and ignored in his country. This documentary follows his pilgrimage to Wirikuta, where he asks gods for permission to make a new mural; his journey across 385 miles of the Peyote Route, and Santos's creative process during the making of a new mural which aims to illustrate the history, mythology and religious traditions of the Huichol people.

Documentary about Tarahumara religious observances around Easter time.

In 1528, a Spanish expedition flounders off the coast of Florida with 600 lives lost. One survivor, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, roams across the American continent searching for his Spanish comrades. Instead, he discovers the Iguase, an ancient Indian tribe. Over the next eight years, Cabeza de Vaca learns their mystical and mysterious culture, becoming a healer and a leader. But soon this New World collides with the Old World as Spanish conquistadors seek to enslave the Indians, and Cabeza de Vaca must confront his own people and his past.

Documentary portrait of a religious healer, and her shamanic mushroom-cult belief system.

Ramona is a Mexican telenovela, based on the 1884 novel Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson. It aired in 2000 on Televisa and was written by Lucy Orozco and Humberto Robles. This production featured Kate Del Castillo as Ramona and Eduardo Palomo as Alejandro.

Drama written by Octavio Paz.

Pablo Rueda, a frustrated writer and artist, wanders through Mexico City in a labyrinth of dreams and memories that may or may not be those of his novels.

Mexican feature film

It's a life told in four seasons. It is the orbit of a man who comes close to and steps back from the light, experiencing weather transformations in the garden of the soul. A documentary about the meticulous construction of Japanese tea houses in the Mexican Ajusco, as an excuse to discover a mind that at first glance might seem obsessive and eccentric.

Documentary showing the efforts to bring cinema to marginalized communities in Mexico.

A document that summarizes images of the energetic Mexican muralist's most significant works, using rhythmic montages that reflect the prevailing mood of each of his pictorial periods and a complex soundtrack composed of effects and various orchestral and choral interventions. Devoid of narration and didactic rigidity, this short film focuses its resources on the pure enjoyment of Orozco's work.