FLM 200: The MSU Film Collective
We are the professors, students, filmmakers, screenwriters, and cinéphiles at MSU who gather weekly in the course FLM 200 to watch and discuss good films. In the spirit of the Cinémathèque française and the generation of film critics and French New Wave directors it inspired, our collective abides by the principle that good film writing and good filmmaking (and just plain good living) begin with serious film watching.
Spring 2025: Latin American Cinema, New or Not
“The New Latin American Cinema is today a reality, but… but… but twenty-five years ago it was utopia. What is the new utopia?” – Fernando Birrí, 1985
This season the MSU Film Collective examines the key films, figures, and ideas in the continental project that came to be known as the “New Latin American Cinema” in 1967, a film movement loosely united by a militant opposition to Hollywood and its commitment to a politics of liberation. Screenings and discussion will uncover the continent’s rich history of nationalist movements, armed revolution, neocolonialism, underdevelopment, debates in national identity, decolonization, organized labor, and aesthetic proposals.
This selection of films return us to the moment of utopia to ask how the New Latin American Cinema movement came of age, how it grew old, and where it is today.
All screenings will take place in B122 Wells Hall at 7pm. The series is free and open to all. West doors to Wells Hall, nearest Spartan Stadium, stay open until 7pm.
Thursday, January 16 – Acquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, 2016, 140′)
Presented by Josh Yumibe
Clara, a 65-year-old widow and retired music critic, vows to live in her apartment until she dies after a developer buys all of the units around her.
Thursday, January 23:
Hasta la Victoria Siempre (Santiago Álvarez, Cuba, 1967, 19′)
La hora de los hornos I/The Hour of the Furnaces I (Octavio Getino/Fernando Solanas, Argentina, 1968, 85′)
Presented by Rutuja Deshmukh
Cuban agit-prop filmmaker Santiago Alvarez produced this radical newsreel within forty-eight hours of Che Guevara’s death by special request of Fidel Castro himself.
Made under the guise of the Cine Liberación Group in the years preceding what came to be known as the Dirty War, The Hour of the Furnaces was simultaneously groundbreaking cinema and a guerilla-style call for the overthrow of Argentina’s dictatorship.
Thursday, January 30:
Diálogo con el Che (José Rodríguez-Soltero, Puerto Rico/USA, 1968, 52′)
Dilema I (Burundanga Boricua) (Poli Marichal, Puerto Rico, 1990, 18′)
el mar editado (Luis Rivera Jiménez, Puerto Rico, 2022, 14′)
Presented by Dalina Perdomo Álvarez & Pedro N Doreste Rodríguez
In 1968, José Rodriguez Soltero made the double screen Dialogue with Che. Dedicated to Berthold Brecht and very much a film influenced by Brechtian techniques, the film features actors from the NY Latin American theatrical scene, including Venezuelan actor, producer, dancer Rolando Pena who plays the title role of Che. The film is a meditation on the death of Che Guevara and a critique of the Hollywood bio-pic Che’ starring Omar Sharif that came out at that time.
Dilema I Combines animation, documentary footage, and hand-painted film as well as slide projections, a painted 12” x 24” backdrop, and sculptural palm tree to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Puerto Rican psyche.
el mar editado is a work of video art that combines YouTube videos to create a visual collage, highlighting how navigation carries different implications depending on who carries it out.
Thursday, February 6: El conde (Pablo Larraín, Chile, 2023, 110′)
Presented by David Schwartz
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old vampire. Now tired of his life, he wants to die at last after the disgrace and family crises he has caused.
Thursday, February 20:
Yawar Mallku/Blood of the Condor (Jorge Sanjinés, Bolivia, 1969, 70′)
Ghal’e (Women’s Quarter) (Kamran Shirdel, Iran, 1966, 18′)
Presented by Farzaneh Ebrahimzadeh Holasu
In Blood of the Condor, a community reacts against a group of foreigners who under the guise of development assistance are forcibly sterilizing the peasant women.
Ghal’e shows the life of prostitutes in Tehran’s city brothels, an area known as Shahre Now. The film closely follows a number of women and communicates how the burden of social constraints led them to surrender in the face of their common fate.
Thursday, February 27: De cierta manera/One Way or Another (Sara Gómez, Cuba, 1974, 119′)
Presented by Tama Hamilton-Wray
In Miraflores, Cuba, the growing romance between Mario, a factory worker, and Yolanda, a schoolteacher, throws into relief the differences in their perspectives and values in Revolutionary Cuba.
Thursday, March 13: Todo parecía posible/Everything Seemed Possible (Ramón Rivera Moret, Puerto Rico/USA, 2024, 105′)
Presented by Ramón Rivera Moret (guest speaker)
Ramón Rivera Moret remembers Puerto Rico at a utopian moment through the films produced in rural communities in the 1950s and 60s by the Film Unit of the Division of Community Education alongside stories from his own family.
Thursday, March 20: Canoa: Memoria de un hecho vergonzoso/Canoa: A Shameful Memory (Felipe Cazals, Mexico, 1976, 115′)
Presented by Cristóbal Martínez
A group of students arrives in a small town during a hiking expedition. Once there, the local priest accuses them of being communist agitators on the run from an army crack-down against student demonstrations in nearby Mexico City and rallies the townsfolk to lynch them.
Thursday, March 27: Raising Victor Vargas (Peter Sollett, USA, 2002, 88′)
Presented by Danny Mendez
Victor, a Lower East Side teenager, as he deals with his eccentric family, including his strict grandmother, his bratty sister, and a younger brother who completely idolizes him. Along the way he tries to win the affections of Judy, who is very careful and calculating when it comes to how she deals with men.
Thursday, April 3: La Llorona (Jayro Bustamante, 2019, Guatemala, 97′)
Presented by Ana Ponce
Accused of the genocide of Mayan people, retired general Enrique is trapped in his mansion by massive protests. Abandoned by his staff, the indignant old man and his family must face the devastating truth of his actions and the growing sense that a wrathful supernatural force is targeting them for his crimes.
Thursday, April 10: Lo que se hereda/It Runs in the Family (Victoria Linares Villegas, Dominican Republic, 2022, 84′)
presented by Victoria Linares Villegas (guest speaker)
A revelation about Oscar Torres, her unknown and once world-famous queer filmmaker cousin, sends Victoria down a path of self-discovery through reconstructions of his intimate memories living in the 1950’s authoritarian Caribbean, as Victoria leads re-enactments of his unproduced screenplays with the family who erased him.
Thursday, April 17: Tan de repente (Diego Lerman, Argentina, 2002, 90′)
Presented by Ellen McCallum
In Argentina, Marcia (Tatiana Saphir) is a dowdy salesgirl working at a Buenos Aires lingerie shop that nobody visits. She has few friends, no boyfriend and low self-esteem. Her tedious life is one day disrupted by two rebellious lesbian strangers, Mao (Carla Crespo) and Lenin (Veronica Hassan), after the sight of Marcia inspires Mao’s lust. The capricious girls kidnap Marcia at knife-point and drag her along on a frenzied, erratic journey of friendship, love and self-discovery.
Thursday, April 24: A selection of Zapatista films (Chiapas Media Project, Mexico, 1990-present)
Presented by Alexandra Halkin (guest speaker)
Founded in 1998 CMP/Promedios was a bi-national collaboration that facilitated the production and distribution of video, radio and multimedia through four regional media centers built and equipped in collaboration with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. CMP/Promedios collaboratively produced 32 indigenous and non-indigenous documentaries for international distribution, from Chiapas, Guerrero, and Chihuahua. These films were screened at over 120 film festivals in 20 countries between 1998 and 2010.