Canoa - Rare Mexican Political Film - Free at UCB PFA

From PFA Calendar at
http://makeashorterlink.com/?F36454BD9

CINE MEXICO:

THU DEC 2 2004
5:30 Canoa (Free Screening!)
Felipe Cazals (Mexico, 1975)

Free First Thursday screening!
Tickets available at the PFA Theater starting at 4:30pm

In 1968, during the height of Mexico's student uprising and social upheaval, a group of university workers on a hiking trip were assaulted by a hysterical mob in the town of San Miguel Canoa. Five people died. Canoa, constructed as a faux documentary, complete with an onscreen narrator, revisits this tragedy to unveil a reactionary system of clerical abuse, rural poverty, and anti-Communist hysteria. Cazals's narrator takes viewers first into Canoa by day, where erosion has created a town of dirt and stone, and where a possibly corrupt priest exhorts his flock to be vigilant against provocateurs; and then into Canoa by night, where five visiting college employees attract suspicion, anger, and finally death. Made only seven years after the actual event, Canoa is for critic Carl J. Mora “the most powerful and unsettling statement on Mexico's bloody repression of 1968.” Part historical document, part true-life horror film, the terrifying images of mob violence, manipulated anger, and attacked innocents remain as frightening now as they were then.

Jason Sanders

Written by Tomás Pérez Turrent. Photographed by Alex Phillips, Jr. With Ernesto Gómez Cruz, Enrique Lucero, Salvador Sánchez, Roberto Sosa, Sr. (115 mins, In Spanish with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

[There will be another Mexican political film (El Cambio/The Change) at 7:45, but it's not free.] See http://makeashorterlink.com/?E4A412BD9.