Lat/Am Daily » movies

Pecados de mi Padre

Peter Krupa — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 03:36:43 +0000

This looks like a fascinating movie: Pecados de mi Padre – Sins of my Father – purports to be a documentary on the life of Pablo Escobar’s son, Sebastián, but it also appears to have a healthy bit of good clean footage and storytelling about Pablo himself.

However, I have to say that having read Killing Pablo the whole thing seems a little weird. According to my foggy recollection, during Pablo’s final days, 16-year-old Sebastián was Pablo’s communication link to the world and to his troops, such as they were by that point.

And he took to the job pretty heartily.

That would make Sebastián a little more than just the innocent bystander he appears to be portraying himself as. Of course, many of us at 16 would have done something similarly craven if given the chance, but I still wonder if this documentary is an attempt at laundering the past.

Anyway, lots of questions. Hope I can find this somewhere other than HBO.

(Thanks to Anahí for the tip on this one.)

Alamar

Peter Krupa — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 03:02:11 +0000

Alamar, a Mexican film about a father and son that is supposedly some kind of documentary/feature film hybrid, won best picture at the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente.

What a pretty-looking movie.

Bigelow turns lens south

Peter Krupa — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:20:14 +0000

Terrifying.

Fresh off her Best Picture win for The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow is talking about her next movie. It’s called Triple Frontier, a mistranslation of Triple Frontera, which is the border region shared by Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. The area is famous for being a no-man’s land, where anything goes, legally speaking.

It’s also famous for getting the stink-eye from the U.S. government for fostering terrorism boogies. Wrote MSNBC in a totally objective, non-panic-inducing article from 2007:

The Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia has taken root in South America, fostering a well-financed force of Islamist radicals boiling with hatred for the United States and ready to die to prove it, according to militia members, U.S. officials and police agencies across the continent.

In the minds of geography-challenged Americans, South America is practically Mexico, which is practically Tucson, so, you know, run for your lives. The U.S. military sent troops to Paraguay in 2005, ostensibly for “joint military exercises,” but more likely to supervise some extra-judicial killing and torture, like in the good old days.

Since Bigelow says Triple Frontier is being written by the same journalist who wrote The Hurt Locker, I imagine it’ll have something to do with terrorism and U.S. military operations in the border region, rather than the piles and piles of other things that happen in Latin America, which again just goes to show that Americans are only interested in the rest of the world insofar as they can view it through the narrow lens of their own domestic preoccupations.

The Donkey Library

Peter Krupa — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:09:34 +0000

The Biblioburro is a great story. Once a week, Mr. Luis Serano saddles up his two burros with a selection of books and rides off into Colombia’s backwoods (in the eastern Caribbean area) to give people a chance to read. In 2008, the New York Times published an excellent profile of the institution.

Now film director Carlos Rendón Zipaguata – who shot a documentary on the Biblioburro – will be doing a feature-length film, according to El Tiempo.

Here’s a little video I found on the Biblioburro (not, I don’t think, shot by Mr. Rendón).