Thoughts on the films and filmmakers I encountered at the Flaherty Seminar last month still reverberate, and I think back constantly on how impressed I was with the way everything fell together so gracefully, even though it was a lot of work--yes, it can be a lot of work sitting and watching films for nine hours a day.
Renee Tajima-Pena was a guest of the Flaherty this year, along with eleven other filmmakers (one of whom, Bahman Ghobadi, could only be there via the magic of cyberspace). She brought her My America. . . or Honk If You Love Buddha from 1997, which we saw in a (chilly) outdoor screening on the beautiful grounds of Colgate University after a lovely lakeside picnic. She also brought a wonderful short video called Skate Manzanar which she created for Roger Shimomura's "Amnesia," which premiered at the Bellevue [Washington] Art Museum in 2001. The last piece we saw of hers at the seminar is a feature film that will have its broadcast debut on September 16 as part of this season's excellent PBS series, POV, executive produced by Simon Kilmurry. Calavera Highway is the story of Armando Pena (Tajima-Pena's husband) and his brother, Carlos. They carry their mother's ashes back to South Texas where they reunite with their five other brothers. On this emotional and haunted journey, a long-buried secret is revealed, and many puzzles that have never been solved about their mother's life and the disappearance of their father during "Operation Wetback," the 1954 US government program that deported over a million Mexican Americans, are finally resolved.
This month, New York audiences will have a chance to see the film in the theater before the broadcast at its New York premiere at the HBO/International Latino Film Festival. It plays at 1:30 p.m. on the 23rd, and at the screening on the 27th at 3:30 p.m., filmmakers Tajima-Pena and Evangeline Greigo will be in attendance for a Q&A. Both screenings are at the Clearview Cinemas at Broadway and Columbus.
At Flaherty, we were also privileged to have an early morning screening of Kent McKenzie's The Exiles, made in Los Angeles in 1961 (a still from the film pictured above). Starting Friday, July 11, for one week only, it's playing at the IFC Center. Made forty-seven years ago and never released, The Exiles (which makes me incredibly nostalgic for a Los Angeles I remember from my early childhood) chronicles one crazy night in the lives of a group of young Native Americans who have come to the big city from reservations in New Mexico and Arizona. They live in downtown L.A.'s Bunker Hill district near the Angel's Flight funicular. With its astounding black and white photography and sophisticated cinematographic language, it's a work of art salvaged by Milestone, who distributed Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep last year. Visit www.exilesfilm.com to learn more about the film's resurrection story and to watch the trailer. If you can manage to go see it at IFC, I strongly encourage you to do so.
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