Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona

Tucson Cine Mexico 2009

Tickets: Film screenings (except Rudo y Cursi) $5 general public (no discounts). Tickets available at the theatre box offices.
Rudo y Cursi: $10 general public (no discounts)/$25 Reserved Seats and Post Screening Reception. Rudo y Cursi + Reception tickets available through 520-621-9303.

Click here to download the entire program guide!

Film Screenings*

*Subject to change


Thursday, March 26
TE ACUERDAS DE LAKE TAHOE?/REMEMBER LAKE TAHOE? (2008, 90 mins)
7:00pm at Harkins Theatres Tucson Spectrum 18


Friday, March 27

MI VIDA DENTRO/MY LIFE INSIDE (2007, 122 mins)
7:00pm at Harkins Theatres Tucson Spectrum 18

LA NAVE DE LOS MONSTROUS/ THE MONSTERS’ SHIP (1959, 81 mins)
9:30pm at Grand Cinemas Crossroads 6


Saturday, March 28

LUZ SILENCIOSA/SILENT LIGHT (Mexico/France/Holland, 2007, 145 min)
7:00pm at Harkins Theatres Tucson Spectrum 18

EL SANTO VS. LA INVASIÓN DE LOS MARCIANOS / EL SANTO VS. THE MARTIAN INVASION (1966, 85 mins)
9:30pm at Grand Cinemas Crossroads 6


Sunday, March 29

LOS CAIDOS/THE FALLEN (2007, 80 min)
2:00pm at Harkins Theatres Tucson Spectrum 18

EL PLANETA DE LAS MUJERES INVASORAS / PLANET OF THE FEMALE INVADERS (1965, 85 min)
5:00pm At Grand Cinema Crossroads 6


Friday, April 3

AÑO UÑA/THE YEAR OF THE NAIL (2007, 78 mins)
7:00pm at Grand Cinemas Crossroads 6


Saturday, April 4

RUDO Y CURSI (2008, 103 mins)
7:00pm at Harkins Theatres Tucson Spectrum 18
Direct from the Sundance Film Festival, An Exclusive Sneak Preview of the Mexican Box Office Hit in Advance of its US Theatrical Release (Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)








Thursday, March 26, 7:00pm
at Harkins Theatres Tucson Spectrum 18

Winner of the FIPRESCI & Alfred Bauer Prizes, Berlin International Film Festival 2008
Winner of Revelation of the Year  -Cannes Film Festival 2008
Arizona Premiere

TE ACUERDAS DE LAKE TAHOE?/REMEMBER LAKE TAHOE?

Mexico, 2008, 90 mins.
Director: Fernando Eimbcke
Producer: Christian Valdelievre
Cast: Diego Catano, Hector Herrera, Daniela Valentine
In Spanish with English subtitles

"A few months after my father’s death, I crashed the only car we had in the family. I disagree with my mother’s thought that this was just a simple accident. Lake Tahoe is a film that was born as an attempt to understand the reasons that pushed me to commit such an act, such an absurd and profoundly human act."  -Fernando Eimbcke

Teenager Juan crashes his family’s car into a telegraph pole on the outskirts of town, and then scours the streets searching for someone to help him fix it. His quest will bring him to Don Heber, an old paranoid mechanic whose only companion is Sica, his almost human boxer dog; to Lucía, a young mother who is convinced that her real place in life is as a lead singer in a punk band, and to “The One who Knows,” a teenage mechanic obsessed with martial arts and Kung Fu philosophy. The absurd and bewildering worlds of these characters drag Juan into a one day journey in which he will come to accept what he was escaping from in the first place--an event both as natural and inexplicable as a loved one’s death.
LAKE TAHOE is a thoughtful, evocative portrayal of death, longing and the static nature of life sometimes. Combining the powers of observance and understatement, Eimbcke renders an emotional tale of a young man on a journey that will change his life. –Shaz Bennett, AFI FEST
“Sweet… Carefully crafted.” –Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter
“Moving… Eimbcke is a master of tone.” – Lee Marshall, Screen Daily




Friday, March 27; 7:00pm
at Harkins Theatres Tucson Spectrum 18

Multi-Award Winning Best Documentary
Arizona Premiere
In association with Ambulante Traveling Documentary Film Festival

MI VIDA DENTRO/MY LIFE INSIDE

Mexico, 2007, 122 mins.
Director: Lucia Gaja
Producer: Rodrigo Herranz
In Spanish with English subtitles

Mild-mannered 17-year-old Rosa Jiménez came to the United States for the same reason as thousands of other Mexican immigrants-to provide a better life for her family back home. At first, America delivered on its promises. Rosa found work in Texas. She found a husband. She had a baby. She sent money home to her doting mother and brothers in Mexico. But several years later the dream turned to a nightmare when a tragedy befell the two year-old boy Rosa was babysitting. My Life Inside catches up with Rosa in Austin in August 2005. She has spent the last two years in a cell. Tomorrow she goes to trial. The charge: murder. Rosa came to America for freedom, and now she stands to lose it forever. "Despite being from Mexico, she's very intelligent," observes the prosecuting attorney at Rosa's trial in one of many infuriating moments of My Life Inside. Like other incarcerated Mexican immigrants in the States, some of whom also share their stories with director Lucía Gajá, Rosa is generally viewed as guilty unless proven innocent. And though the case against Rosa is barely strong enough to be called a house of cards, her fiery defense attorney struggles to convince the jury to see past the fact that Rosa came to America illegally. This is no episode of Court TV: Gajá's impassioned documentary is full of sound and color and feisty editing. She laces into the trial footage heartbreaking interviews with Rosa's mother and husband, video from the jailhouse interrogation that was fraught with language barriers, and softly spoken revelations from Rosa herself. So effective are Gajá's methods that, by the time the verdict is delivered, viewers are left feeling as though their own lives hang in the balance.  --Peter Scarlet, Tribeca Film Festival 2008



Friday, March 27; 9:30pm at Grand Cinemas Crossroads 6

Vintage Mexican Sci Fi  - New 35mm Print! 
This film is part of El Futuro Más Acá: The Future South of the Border film series curated by Itala Schmeltz, Vania Rojas and Héctor Orozco.  Presented in Association with Cinema Tropical and Filmoteca de la UNAM

LA NAVE DE LOS MONSTROUS/ THE MONSTERS’ SHIP

Mexico, 1959, 81 mins.
Director: Rogelio A Gonzalez
Cast: Eulalio González "Piporro," Ana Bertha Lepe, Lorena Velázquez, Consuelo Frank, and Heberto Dávila, Jr.
In Spanish with English subtitles

FILM INTRODUCED BY: CARLOS GUTIERREZ, CINEMA TROPICAL

The last man on Venus has died and the planet's regent sends two beautiful Venusians, Gamma and Beta, on a quest for males on other worlds. In their travels through the universe they capture several specimens, all of them monstrous. When their spaceship breaks down, Gamma, Beta and Tor (the robot) have to perform an emergency landing in Chihuahua where they meet Laureano and his brother Chuy. Laureano explains what love is to the aliens, but only Gamma comprehends the friendly northern-Mexican earthling's meaning. Beta decides to conquer the Earth, using the robot and the monsters as her minions. Now Laureano must save the planet while taking time out to woo Gamma.






Saturday, March 28; 7:00pm
at Harkins Theatres Tucson Spectrum 18

Winner of 34 International Awards!
2007 Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize Winner
2007 Golden Ariel for Best Direction
Arizona Premiere

 

LUZ SILENCIOSA/SILENT LIGHT

Mexico/France/Holland, 2007, 145 min.
Director: Carlos Reygadas
Producer: Jaime Romandia
In Low German, Spanish, French, and English with English subtitles
Johan and his family are Mennonites in northern Mexico. In violation of the laws of God and man, Johan has fallen in love with another women.

The happiest surprise of the festival (Cannes) has been Silent Light, a film that continues to linger in my thoughts days after seeing it. Set in an isolated Mennonite community in northern Mexico and made with the participation of some actual Mennonites, it relates an outwardly simple story of sin and forgiveness with complexity and breathtakingly beautiful imagery. As he did in his first two features, Japón and Battle in Heaven, Mr. Reygadas inserts us right in the middle of a strange world without preamble, letting us discover its mysteries, including its people, through the slow, steady accretion of gestures, daily rituals, conversational fragments and glimpses of life as it’s experienced inside the private spaces of home and the larger communal spaces beyond.

In the film’s mesmerizing opening sequence the camera traces a downward arc against a nearly pitch-black sky as eerie animal screams fill the soundtrack. Underlying this primordial symphony is a rhythmically pulsing and unidentifiable noise: It sounds as if the very world were breathing. As the sky slowly lightens, the camera descends close to the ground, whereupon it begins moving toward a canopy of trees and the softly graying sky. A slash of blood red cuts across the horizon, signaling the dawn of a new day. It’s a radiant overture to Mr. Reygadas’s characters, whose gentle, intimate relationships with one another, with the natural world and with God seem to light them from within. That the filmmaker shares their world and its sense of grace without cynicism is in itself a small miracle.  - Manohla Dargis, New York Times



Saturday, March 28; 9:30pm
at Grand Cinemas Crossroads 6

Vintage Mexican Sci Fi  - New 35mm Print! 
This film is part of El Futuro Más Acá: The Future South of the Border film series curated by Itala Schmeltz, Vania Rojas and Héctor Orozco. Presented in Association with Cinema Tropical and Filmoteca de la UNAM

EL SANTO VS. LA INVASIÓN DE LOS MARCIANOS / EL SANTO VS. THE MARTIAN INVASION

Mexico, 1966, 85 mins.
Director: Alfredo B. Crevenna
Cast: Santo el Enmascarado de Plata, Maura Monti, Gilda Mirós, Belinda Corel, Eva Norvind.
In Spanish with English subtitles

FILM INTRODUCED BY: CARLOS GUTIERREZ, CINEMA TROPICAL

Since earthlings refuse to stop nuclear testing, Martians are threatening to disintegrate everyone on Earth with their astral eye. To teach humanity a lesson, they have decided to first destroy a pacifist nation: Mexico. The three-eyed aliens kidnap several earthlings while they figure out how to
eliminate the only man who can stop them from carrying out their evil plot: Santo, the Man with the Silver Mask. In an effort to stop the invaders, our hero will manage to snatch a Martian belt -a teleporting device that will allow him to sneak aboard the alien ship where his final confrontation with the invaders will take place.




Sunday, March 29, 2:00pm
at Harkins Theatres Tucson Spectrum 18

In association with Ambulante Traveling Documentary Film Festival
Arizona Premiere

LOS CAIDOS/THE FALLEN

Mexico, 2007, 80 min.
Director: Rudy Joffroy
Producers: Hector Ponce, Rudy Joffroy
In Spanish with English subtitles

IN PERSON: DIRECTOR RUDY JOFFROY

At once explosive, compulsive and terrifying, Director Rudy Joffroy’s new documentary The Fallen leads us through the heart of a tragedy, and into a dark world of corporate greed, corruption, and negligence. -Christopher McKinnon, Hot Docs- Canadian International Documentary Festival

Sixty three miners are still buried under the debris of the carbon mine Pasta de Conchos, while in Mexico City the media and the federal government create a confusing array of misinformation, cover-up, and negligence. Los Caídos details the facts of the historical mining conflict in Mexico, which took place between 2006 and 2007. It uncovers the truth that Vicente Fox's administration, and the corporations involved, shamefully hid, including the fascist manner in which the union leader was overthrown and accused of involvement in an alleged fraud of 55 million pesos, which served to divert attention from the frauds the government itself was involved in. Beginning with the "industrial homicide" in Pasta de Conchos, an explosion of the carbon mine caused by the company's indifference to various security warnings, the documentary explores the 152-day strike in Michoacán, where the police left 2 dead miners and another 120 injured. The story is told through first-hand testimonies of journalists, lawyers, and case-experts, and through the working-class families who lived it. – Ambulant 2008




Sunday, March 29; 5:00pm
At Grand Cinema Crossroads 6

Vintage Mexican Sci Fi  - New 35mm Print! 
This film is part of El Futuro Más Acá: The Future South of the Border film series curated by Itala Schmeltz, Vania Rojas and Héctor Orozco. Presented in Association with Cinema Tropical and Filmoteca de la UNAM

EL PLANETA DE LAS MUJERES INVASORAS / PLANET OF THE FEMALE INVADERS

Mexico, 1965, 85 min.
Director: Alfredo B. Crevenna
Cast: Lorena Velásquez, Elizabeth Campbell, Maura Monti, Guillermo Murray, Adriana Roel, Rogelio Guerra and José Ángel Espinosa “Ferrusquilla.”
In Spanish with English subtitles
FILM INTRODUCED BY: CARLOS GUTIERREZ, CINEMA TROPICAL

This classic is a sequel to Gigantes Planetarios (Planetary Giants) in which the cast was never aware that the scenes they were filming would not be used to make just one, but two separate movies. While strolling through the town fair, Marcos the boxer, Taquito his 'second,' and the beautiful Silvia board a flying saucer believing it to be a fairground attraction. The vehicle takes off and carries them away to the planet Sibila, ruled by ruthless Queen Adastrea. The Sibilians want to use human transplants to adapt their lungs to the Earth's atmosphere in order to invade the planet. Alburnia, the queen's good-hearted twin sister, warns scientist Daniel Wolf of the Sibilians' evil scheme. He then travels to Sibila to seduce and doublecross Adastrea in order to foil her plans and save the Earth.




Friday, April 3, 7:00pm
at Grand Cinemas Crossroads 6

Screened in Venice International Film Festival
Arizona Premiere

AÑO UÑA/THE YEAR OF THE NAIL

Mexico, 2007, 78 mins.
Director: Jonas Cuaron
Executive Producer: Alfonso Cuaron
Producers: Frida Torresblanco, Jonas Cuaron, Eireann Harper
Cast: Diego Cantano, Eireann Harper
In English and Spanish with English subtitles

IN PERSON: PRODUCER FRIDA TORRESBLANCO

Jonás Cuarón’s début is an exciting, charming and genuinely touching coming-of-age movie that defies conventional generic boundaries. The son of Alfonso, Cuarón Jr. draws on many notions from his father’s work and indeed the broader context of recent Mexican cinema; a cross generational relationship,  the trials of puberty and the fleeting moments that shape young lives, so intense and affecting at the time yet painfully short-lived.  But here they are shaped into an experimental and fresh piece of work that resembles the exotic child from a union between La Jetée and Y Tu Mamá También. A documentary spliced with coming-of-age drama composed entirely of still photographs edited into a narrative that spans a year in the lives of Molly (Eireann Harper), a 21 year old American travelling through Mexico, and Diego (Diego Cataño), a typically and perpetually horny 14 year old – naïve, romantic and troubled by a persistent ingrowing toenail…A gentle yet profoundly moving film, Año Uña captures the uncertainty, irrepressible urges and transience of growing up with flair, imagination and telling insight. A work of fiction with no actors, a documentary with a fictional narrative. However you look at this, it’s a remarkable piece of film making that betrays a sensitivity and imagination that promises great things from Cuarón.
–James Dennis, TwitchFilm




Saturday, April 4, 7:00pm
at Harkins Theatres Tucson Spectrum 18

Direct from the Sundance Film Festival
An Exclusive Sneak Preview of the Mexican Box Office Hit
in Advance of its US Theatrical Release
Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

RUDO Y CURSI

Mexico, 2008, 103 mins.
Director: Carlos Cuaron
Producers: Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, Guillermo del Toro, Frida Torresblanco, Tita Lombardo
Cast: Diego Luna, Gael García Bernal, Guillermo Fracella
In Spanish with English subtitles

IN PERSON: PRODUCER FRIDA TORRESBLANCO

Y Tu Mamá También costars Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna are reunited on the big screen in Rudo y Cursi, a delightful romp of a comedy drama deftly directed by Carlos Cuaron. Beto (Luna) and Tato (Bernal) are a pair of rivaling, dim-witted brothers who work on a dusty banana ranch and play soccer for their local team. Beto, a goalie whose hot temper on the field earns him the nickname of Rudo, dreams of becoming a professional soccer player, while Tato wants to be a famous singer. They both share the dream of building a big house for their mother, Elvira, but all of their desires seem completely out of reach, that is, until a talent scout, Batuta, discovers their skill on the field. To Beto’s chagrin, it is Tato, whose curlicue field play earns him the nickname of Cursi, who is chosen to become a star player. Not to be bested, Beto scores a goalie position on a rival team, further intensifying the competition between them. But success makes the brothers confront their own personal demons and sets them on a chase for more than just soccer balls. Cuaron keeps the energy high and the laughter rolling even as he crafts a moral into the story. But even if the dueling brothers do find a way out of the banana ranch, will the banana ranch ever find a way out of them?
 - Sundance Film Festival 2009

Rudo y Corsi Post Screening Private Reception; 9:30pm
Location TBA






Tucson Cine Mexico 2009 is made possible with additional support from the Secretaria de  Relaciones Exteriores, Mexico; UA Center for Latin American Studies; UA School of Media Arts; UA Department of Women’s Studies; La Estrella Bakery

Special thanks to: Sony Pictures Classics; IMCINE; Ambulante; USA Palisades and Berlin Public Relations; Film Movement; Jill Bean

For more Tucson Cine Mexico 2009 Festival information: 520-626-9825
For directions to Harkins Theatres Tucson Spectrum 18:
www.harkinstheatres.com or (520) 889-5588
For directions to Grand Cinemas Crossroads 6: www. movievalue.com or 520.327.7067