VivirLatino

If I weren’t running around with the LAMC, I’d be on a rooftop watching movies. Tonight, Rooftop Films, on the roof of el Museo del Barrio in espanish Harlem features two Latin American reels, La Corona y Alguna Tristeza.

Alguna Tristeza (Some Kind of Sadness) (Juan Alejandro Ramirez | Peru | 41:00)
Beginning with ruminations on the Peruvian soccer team’s overturned victory in the 1936 Olympics, Juan Alejandro Ramirez’ mesmerizing documentary intertwines multiple themes—personal, political, historical and anthropological—and creates a uniquely magical tapestry, shaded in the hues of his native countryside. This group of seemingly unrelated vignettes are always intensely emotional in tone: the ill-feeling after the stolen victory; a moody cab driver’s blind faith for a better future; the emptiness of a discovery that was never recognized; the alienation of an outsider in a remote Amazonian town; and the determination of a trio of waiters aboard a train that runs across the barren Southern Andean tundra. Altogether, these episodes run together like a narrated home movie for a meandering pilgrimage in pursuit of answers that ultimately unravel.

INTERMISSION

La Corona (Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega | Colombia and the U.S.A. | 40:00)
The contestants are accused murderers, guerrillas, and thieves. The winner will be crowned Queen, but she won’t be invited on a press tour as a role model for young girls. Instead, she will be escorted back to her cell.

Nominated for an Academy Award, La Corona documents the boisterous annual beauty pageants in El Buen Pastor, a women’s prison in Colombia . Every year the prison administration allows the various cellblocks to nominate one woman to represent them in the prison-wide competition, and the ensuing spectacle is so ostentatiously festive and irresistibly colorful that it is even covered by the national media. Colombian-born filmmaker Isabel Vega read about the pageants in an article and soon teamed with long-time collaborator Amanda Micheli to capture the uniquely Colombian event. Despite difficulties working with the warden, the filmmakers succeed in capturing the spirit of the affair and glimpses of the contestants’ complex motivations. Despite their hardships, the women rally around their nominees and show intense pride and loyalty to their cellblock communities, even in defeat.

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