Cinema Mentiré - Latin American film club

GET YOUR TICKETS HERE: https://thecastlecinema.com/programme/112740/lulu-presented-by-cinema-mentire/

Lucas and Ludmila are young lovers living on the streets of Buenos Aires, navigating the city as if it were a board game.

Lucas works collecting bones and butcher-shop scraps in a truck, spending much of his time roaming the city with a gun, firing celebratory bullets at city monuments and excited by the infinite possibilities around him and the sense of impunity that love affords him. Ludmila rolls around in a wheelchair she might not really need, avoiding her family’s responsibilities. When Ludmila finally makes a decision that leaves Lucas alone in the city, he will have to reconsider his behaviour and relationship with his gun.

Lulú is a freewheeling and unruly film from prolific Argentinian director Luis Ortega, whose surreal cinematic language cuts through expected norms and tackles the tribulations of love, loyalty, and lawlessness.

GET YOUR TICKETS HERE: https://www.ica.art/films/bodies-adrift-miami

Both from 1981, Tent City (dir. Miñuca Villaverde, 31’) and Mayami Nuestro (dir. Carlos Oteyza, 33’) present contrasting and penetrating non-fiction portraits of Latin American diaspora communities in Miami.

Over several months in 1980, some 120,000 Cubans left their island for the United States in a mass exodus known as the Mariel boatlift. Fifteen years after having left Cuba herself, Miñuca Villaverde, alongside her husband Fernando visited the so-called “Tent City”, an improvised camp of these marielitos beneath the I-95 highway in Miami. Tent City explores that microcosm and reveals the day-to-day life of several refugees, “men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, whose lives were only separated by cloth curtains hanging between the beds like floating walls”. Empathetic but refusing victimhood, moving and reflexive, Tent City is one of the essential films about the Cuban diaspora, a portrait of people discarded by history in their incessant search for agency and liberty.

Carlos Oteyza’s Mayami Nuestro, meanwhile, takes a satirical yet affectionate look at Venezuela’s elite, capturing the exodus of petro-dollars from Venezuela to Miami in the 1980s. Contrasting Venezuela’s social inequalities with Miami’s sanitised consumerism, the film humorously registers both a frivolous neocolonial fantasy as well as a fleeting reversal of global capitalist hierarchies, when oil wealth gave the Venezuelan upper classes unprecedented power. With millions of Venezuelans in recent years traversing the Darién Gap in search of opportunity in the US, Mayami Nuestro resonates anew, highlighting the persistence of economic and cultural hierarchies in the Americas and beyond.

GET YOUR TICKETS HERE: https://www.ica.art/films/bodies-adrift-villaverdes-shorts

This programme traces the Villaverde filmmaking couple’s trajectory from revolutionary Cuba in the early 1960s to the experimental underground scene of 1970s New York. Beginning with The Park, filmed in one of Havana’s epicentres, and continuing through a series of intimate works made in exile, the session reveals their continuous reinvention of cinematic form and production methods. Moving from institutional filmmaking to a radically independent practice shot on 16mm with minimal resources, the Villaverdes remained at the margins of the cultural movements they inhabited. Their Cuban films were often censored or scarcely exhibited, while their US output has only recently begun to be discovered through restorations by the Filmoteca de Catalunya.

Across these films runs a persistent attention to lives situated at the edges of societal structures: the elderly figures wandering through The Park; immigrants navigating displacement (A Lady’s Home Journal); and women confronting domestic roles and gender violence (Blanca Putica, Poor Cinderella). As the filmmakers moved from Cuba to the United States, their cinema shifted from observing bodies in public space to examining their own within the private confines of home. The result is a body of work that quietly resists grand historical narratives in favour of the fragile, everyday experiences of those who remain on the margins.