Country:Mexico

Director:Alejandro Jordorowsky

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Jordorowsky daringly blends resplendant ritual, outright kitsch and provocative excess. A Christlike figure wanders through bizarre, grotesque scenarios filled with alternately religious and sacrilegious imagery. He meets a mystical guide who introduces him to seven wealthy and powerful individuals, each representing a planet in the solar system.

Country:Mexico

Director:Alejandro Jordorowsky

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

This psychedelic and allegorical western saga prompted a new approach to exhibition of independent and alternative cinema. It is honored as the first midnight movie (films which play continuously for years in weekend midnight screenings). The title refers to a mole who after determinedly burrowing through the ground reaches the surface of the earth only to be blinded by the sun. At the outset, the gunfighter known as El Topo and his young son ride through a desert to a village, whose inhabitants have been massacred.

Country:Mexico

Director:Alejandro Jordorowsky

Summary:

Jodorowsky’s first feature is loosely based on a play written by Fernando Arrabal in that he filmed it as he remembered it without recourse to the text. The result in a perverse third world fable that is eager to stretch the boundaries of the acceptable. The film follows Fando and his paraplegic girlfriend Lis searching amid a destroyed world for a mythic city called Tar where all their wishes will be fulfilled. But, instead, they are corrupted and driven mad.

Country:Mexico

Director:Rayundo Gleyzer

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Gleyzer weaves together a rich tapestry of parallels between past and present revolutionary ideals. Gleyzer utilizes a wealth of rare newreel footage of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata to connect the betrayal of the 1910 Mexico Revolution with the failed revolution of Gleyzer's own time. At great risk to his own safety, Gleyzer exposed corruption in the PRI--the party that governed Mexico for almost 70 years. The film created a storm of controversy which brought Gleyzer to the forefront as a leader of the Third Cinema.

Country:Mexico

Director:Guillermo del Toro

Program:Contemporary World Cinema

Summary:

In 1944, in the post-Civil War in Spain, rebels still fight in the mountains against the fascist troops. The young and imaginative Ofelia travels with her pregnant and sick mother Carmen Vidal to the country to live with her stepfather, the sadistic and cruel Captain Vidal, in an old mill. During the night, Ofelia meets a fairy and together they go to a pit in the centre of a maze where they meet a faun that tells that she is a princess from a kingdom in the underground.

Link to IMDB.com

Country:Mexico

Director:Carlos Reygadas

Program:Contemporary World Cinema

Summary:

In the north of Mexico there is a Mennonite community that tries to lead its simple religiously-inspired farming life as far as possible away from interfering authorities. In this special community Reygadas has set his magisterial third feature which makes a quite bluntly deliberate homage to Carl Theodore Dreyer’s masterwork, Ordet. A married God-fearing farmer with a wife and children has fallen in love with another woman and she has fallen in love with him. Their impossible love conflicts with God’s will and this is their conviction.

Link to IMDB.com