• Bruno Varela: Materia oscura

  • Grupo Los Vagos: Zona intertidal

Streaming—Dark Matter: Collective, Singular, and Parodic Resistance

Program Available for Three Days Only, September 29–October 1

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Livestream Conversation
Jesse Lerner, Zigmunt Cedinsky, and Bruno Varela
Wednesday, September 30, 8:30 PM PDT

Join us for a live conversation with Jesse Lerner, a documentary filmmaker, curator, and writer and the coeditor of Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America, and filmmakers Zigmunt Cedinsky and Bruno Varela. Access is included with rental of the streaming film program; you will receive an access link via email prior to the event.

Created during and between military coups, civil wars, authoritarian regimes, and invasions led by the United States, experimental cinema in Latin America has been impacted by diverse forms of social upheaval and violence. In many of these contexts, resistance or even social commentary can be a precarious, even dangerous, project. This program surveys some of these expressions. In the war-torn El Salvador of 1980, the collective Los Vagos shot Zona intertidal, a poetic treatment of the politically motivated assassination of a leftist professor by death squads. In Materia oscura Bruno Varela comments on the search for clues to the disappearance of forty-three students in southern Mexico. Paz Encina’s Tristezas is based on a story about a political prisoner; Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Post-Military Cinema was shot on a decommissioned military base in Puerto Rico. Zigmunt Cedinsky takes a satirical approach in La guerra sin fin (I’m very happy), while the Colombian filmmaker Camilo Restrepo’s Impresión de una guerra offers up an essayistic reflection on the lasting legacies of decades of violence in his homeland.

—Los Angeles Filmforum

Films in this Screening

Zona intertidal
(Intertidal Zone)

Grupo Los Vagos, El Salvador, 1980

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • Color
  • 16mm transferred to digital
  • 14 mins

Tristezas
(Sorrows)

Paz Encina, Paraguay, 2016

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • Color
  • Digital
  • 7 mins

Materia oscura
(Dark Matter)

Bruno Varela, Mexico, 2016

FILM DETAILS 
Language
  • Spanish
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W/Color
  • Digital
  • 8 mins

Post-Military Cinema

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Puerto Rico, 2014

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • Color
  • Digital
  • 11 mins

La guerra sin fin (I’m very happy)
(The Unfinished War (I’m very happy))

Zigmunt Cedinsky, Venezuela, 2006

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • Color
  • 35mm transferred to digital
  • 8 mins

Impresión de una guerra

Camilo Restrepo, Colombia/France, 2015

FILM DETAILS 
Language
  • Spanish
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • Color
  • 16mm transferred to digital
  • 26 mins