The Concord University Division of Humanities, the Spanish Program and the Spanish Club are presenting the 2nd Annual Hispanic Film Festival April 1-3, 2014. Showtime is 6 p.m. each evening in ADMIN 237 on the Athens campus.
Please note that the films contain mature themes and viewer discretion is advised.
This event is open to the general public at no charge. Snacks will be provided. For more information contact Dr. Ryan Hallows at rhallows@concord.edu or 304-384-6288.
The following three films will be presented:
April 1st – Tlatelolco, verano de ’68 (Mexico). 108 minutes. Spanish.
Based on real-life events in the lead up to the 1968 Summer Olympics, Carlos Bolado’s drama tells the love story between two students from different social backgrounds. As the first developing country to host the Summer Olympic Games, Mexico City was under a magnifying glass in 1968. Under this immense pressure, the government strove to advance the city in an attempt to present it as a stable and peaceful nation, but was confronted by student riots and demonstrations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhznv2THRHc
April 2nd – La Sirga (Colombia). 90 minutes. Spanish.
Alicia is helpless. Traumatizing war memories invade her mind like a ceaseless storm. Uprooted from her destroyed village by the armed conflict, Alicia tries to start a new life in La Sirga, a decadent hostel on the shores of a great lake in the highlands of the Andes. The house belongs to Oscar, her only living relative, and an old solitary hermit. There, on a swampy and murky beach, she will try to settle down until her fears and the threat of war resurface again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVqaEJS08dE
April 3rd – La noche de enfrente (Chile). 111 minutes. Spanish.
The late Chilean director Raúl Ruiz’s final film is one of the cinema’s grandest, most graceful farewells to life. Its protagonist, Celso Robles, an aging bachelor and small-town office clerk on the verge of retirement, is a poetic dreamer and local character whose musings are infused with a premonition of his own mortality, in the person of his landlady’s nephew, whom he suspects of plotting to kill him. The town’s charming romantic intrigues meld with Celso’s reminiscences of childhood; his erstwhile fantasies—involving Long John Silver, who taught him the art of living; the novelist Jean Giono, who awakened his literary imagination; and Beethoven, whom he introduced to electricity and movies—join with visions of the grudges, joys, and political conflicts that marked his prodigious youth. But when death takes over, it does so in a series of fanciful masterstrokes—such as an ingenious rechannelling of 007’s spiral-grooved gun barrel—that exalt and prolong the last glimmer of life even as they embrace death with noble serenity. Ingenious digital effects turn nostalgic and chatty home-town strolls into dreamlike adventures, but ultra-low-tech toys become Ruiz’s tenderly exuberant metaphor for the surprising ricochets of an entire lifetime’s play of memory in Spanish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVb457u 0rBQ
Persons with disabilities should contact Nancy Ellison, 1-304-384-6086 or 1-800-344-6679 extension 6086 if special assistance is required for access to an event scheduled by the university on campus.
