Cabeza de Vaca

Appalachian Journey

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.

Mom

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

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.

Teshuinada, semana santa Tarahumara

Documentary about Tarahumara religious observances around Easter time.

Peasant Poets

Maria Sabina, Spirit Woman

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

Ramona

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.

Enemies

Life Kills

A romantic comedy of our times about passion, friendship and lies, on one of those days when the city and its inhabitants go crazy and anything seems possible. Diego and Silvia meet each other and fall in love thanks to their masterly lies. The morning after, with their respective friends, they remember the encounter and slowly begin to realize how sincere and honest that relationship was. When the opportunity arises, both struggle to meet again on a day in which a sudden and unusual disorder reigns in Mexico City.

Sor Juana Inez de la cruz

Drama written by Octavio Paz.

Conversando con Cristina Pacheco

De la calle

Mexican feature film

The Day Pedro Infante Died

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.

Sunka Raku (Alegría Evanescente)

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.

Mexico Mobile Cinema

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

José Clemente Orozco, pintor del hombre

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.

The Emerald Forest

For ten years, engineer Bill Markham has searched tirelessly for his son Tommy who disappeared from the edge of the Brazilian rainforest. Miraculously, he finds the boy living among the reclusive Amazon tribe who adopted him. And that's when Bill's adventure truly begins. For his son is now a grown tribesman who moves skillfully through this beautiful-but-dangerous terrain, fearful only of those who would exploit it. And as Bill attempts to "rescue" him from the savagery of the untamed jungle, Tommy challenges Bill's idea of true civilization and his notions about who needs rescuing.

Fire on the Amazon

When a well-known environmental researcher is murdered in the Amazon jungle, an arrogant photojournalist joins forces with a beautiful young activist to find out who is responsible. Along they way, they fall in love as they discover the men responsible for the killing would be more than willing to murder again if it will keep them quiet.

The Mission

When a Spanish Jesuit goes into the South American wilderness to build a mission in the hope of converting the Indians of the region, a slave hunter is converted and joins his mission. When Spain sells the colony to Portugal, they are forced to defend all they have built against the Portuguese aggressors.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Beginning just after the bloody Sioux victory over General Custer at Little Big Horn, the story is told through two unique perspectives: Charles Eastman, a young, white-educated Sioux doctor held up as living proof of the alleged success of assimilation, and Sitting Bull the proud Lakota chief whose tribe won the American Indians’ last major victory at Little Big Horn.

Soldier Blue

After a cavalry group is massacred by the Cheyenne, only two survivors remain: Honus, a naive private devoted to his duty, and Cresta, a young woman who had lived with the Cheyenne two years and whose sympathies lie more with them than with the US government. Together, they must try to reach the cavalry's main base camp. As they travel onward, Honus is torn between his growing affection for Cresta.

La Llorona

Accused of the genocide of Mayan people, retired general Enrique is trapped in his mansion by massive protests. Abandoned by his staff, the indignant old man and his family must face the devastating truth of his actions and the growing sense that a wrathful supernatural force is targeting them for his crimes.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

A few decades after the destruction of the Inca Empire, a Spanish expedition led by the infamous Aguirre leaves the mountains of Peru and goes down the Amazon River in search of the lost city of El Dorado. When great difficulties arise, Aguirre’s men start to wonder whether their quest will lead them to prosperity or certain death.

Embrace of the Serpent

The epic story of the first contact, encounter, approach, betrayal and, eventually, life-transcending friendship, between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman, last survivor of his people, and two scientists that, over the course of 40 years, travel through the Amazon in search of a sacred plant that can heal them. Inspired by the journals of the first explorers of the Colombian Amazon, Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes.