Fantastico

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art is doing a great Latin Film festival this week. Go here to check it out and then salsa yourself over there.

The LatinBeat Film Festival is presented in conjunction with the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Emerging Pictures. It features award-winning films from Latin American countries including Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, Ecuador, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Brazil, and Mexico.
$5 for members, $7 for non-members
See both films on Sunday for a discounted price of $7 for members and $12 for non-members with the 2 Film Pass!
Purchase your tickets online
Thursday and Friday, November 1 - 2
Tapas with a Latin Twist
Seating from 6 - 9 pm
For reservations call 901.544.6225
The Brushmark will offer a menu of tapas (small plates) with a Latin influence. So, enjoy a glass of wine and tapas before the films and get into the Latin groove!

Thursday, November 1, 7:30 pm
The Most Beautiful of My Very Best Years
(94 mins)
Berto lives in the small Bolivian city of Cochabamba. He wants to leave the country, but without money for a ticket, he decides to sell his prized possession––a 1965 Volkswagen he inherited from his grandfather––with the help of his know-it-all best friend Victor and Camila, Victor's girlfriend.

Delightfully understated but with great attention to detail, Boulocq’s film is an urban Bolivian fable with a love square at its center––two men, a woman and their car. Its skillfully fractured structure is a counterpoint to the parsimonious rhythm of the friends’ lives and of the city that comes to define them.

Friday, November 2, 7:30 pm
Fotografias (112 mins)
“This is a personal essay about my mother, based on a box of photographs my father passed on to me. A documentary investigation involving a journey to the past and also a real one from Argentina, where I live, to the place where she was born and which she wanted to forget: India.”––Andrés Di Tella

The filmmaker’s mother, Kamala Aparao, was a member of an aristocratic Indian family in the first half of the 20th century. At a young age, she joined the socialist party and, further shocking her traditional family, went on to marry Torcuato Di Tella, a well-known sociologist from Argentina. With his own son in tow, Andrés Di Tella traces the imprints of his mother’s history. He explores with insight and disarming honesty issues of identity, bicultural displacement, family tradition, the inescapability of one’s cultural legacy, and how our notions of fatherhood and motherhood can change with time and distance.

Sunday, November 4, 2 pm
My Grandmother Has A Video Camera (60 mins)
Tania Cypriano’s documentary portrays the lives of a family of Brazilian immigrants in the United States over more than 20 years, using their own home video footage. Enchantment turns into disillusionment, idealization to conformity, as images and voices depict how newly arriving immigrants see their new world and struggle to establish a final home. My Grandmother Has a Video Camera is fast-paced and funny, as well as an endearing take on the issues of migration, displacement and the search for an identity.

Pinta the Bird (10 mins)
A book opens to create this story of a village in the smallest country of the American continent, where the magical legend of Pinta the Bird makes a boy and a girl’s dreams come true.

Sunday, November 4, 3:30 pm
Soy Andina (67 mins)
After 15 years in New York, Nélida Silva returns to her birthplace in the Andes to fulfill a lifelong dream of hosting the Fiesta Patronal––a week of dance, music, and ritual honoring the town’s patron saint. But Neli's changed, and so has the village. What's it like to go back to the Andes when you've become a New Yorker? After meeting Neli, Cynthia Paniagua, a dancer raised in Queens by a Peruvian mom, embarks on her own Peruvian journey, determined to know the real Peru and understand its art forms. Soy Andina is an exuberant cross-cultural road trip, propelled by traditional music and dance rarely seen outside the country. But the core story is intimate and universal: a yearning for roots and connection in a globalized world.