Double Feature
Rojo amanecer (Red dawn)
Jorge Fons, 1989, 96 min., DVD
Set during the October 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, just weeks before Mexico City was to host the Olympic Games, Rojo amanecer follows the lives of a middle-class Mexican family living in an apartment in the city’s Tlatelolco district. Motivated by fear of radicalism (and backed by the CIA), President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz ordered the military occupation of the country’s largest university to quell any signs of civil unrest. What resulted were indiscriminate beatings and shootings, with a body count that remains in dispute. Created out of witness and victim testimonials, Rojo amanecer offers a powerful look at late 1960s Mexico.
Summer ’68
Norman Fruchter and John Douglas, 1969, 60 min., Beta SP
79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh
Santiago Álvarez, 1969, 25 min., Beta SP
3:00 p.m.
Phyllis Wattis Theater
Summer ’68 documents protest activities that surrounded the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was produced by Newsreel, a radical collective formed in New York City in 1967 that served as the propaganda arm of various social and political movements.
Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez was quoted as saying “the revolution made me a filmmaker.” Thus inspired, he created politically charged films that, though state-sponsored, are highly personal works of art. Here, Alvarez documents the funeral of Ho Chi Minh.