Al Más Allá

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At the center of Al Más Allá is an allegory of three Mexican fishermen. After absconding with illegal drugs that wash ashore on the Mayan coast, they sell them to the corrupt local police for a handsome sum. An experimental documentary that uses fictional elements, Al Más Allá places the personal moral degeneration of the fishermen in the political context of a nation struggling on the edge of the global economy. Pulled in the direction of other Caribbean resort communities, Mexico’s underdeveloped Mayan coast is quickly becoming both a lavish playground of the international leisure class and a major conduit for illegal drugs in transit from South America to U.S. markets.

To investigate this tumultuous and transformative moment in Mexico, director Lourdes Portillo humorously employs a fictional crew lead by a vain and blindly arrogant documentary filmmaker played by famed Mexican actress Ofelia Medina. Real interviews with tourist guides, merchants, and American expats about the corruption and violence caused by drug trafficking are interspersed with stylized narrative scenes that reveal the filmmaker’s preoccupations and personal ambitions. Lyrical, visually intriguing, and entertaining, Al Más Allá is at once reportage into the expansive world of drug trafficking across Mexico and an ironic indictment of the cult of the documentary filmmaker whose romantic visions of herself and her mission often obscures the very truth she seeks. (US, 2008, 43 minutes, Spanish and English with Subtitles)

Opening film for the evening before Al Más Allá screening

El Sol Sale Para Todos

Directed by Leticia Roa Nixon (in person), Carlos Pascual (in person) and Laura Deutch (in person)

El Sol Sale chronicles the rapid growth of the Mexican community in the historically immigrant neighborhood of South Philadelphia. Told through the first hand experiences of the main subjects who have been a formative part of this development over the last 20 years, a collective story of the community unfolds. However with growth and assimilation, come problems, resistance and efforts to organize. El Sol Sale presents stories from the subjects’ memories, reflections and perspectives about the complexity of searching for a better life in a country that is not one’s own. (US, 2010, 40 minutes)

Presented in partnership with Casa Monarca and Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University

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Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and raised in Los Angeles, Lourdes Portillo has been making award-winning films about Latin American, Mexican, and Chicano/a experiences and social justice issues for nearly thirty years. Since her first film, After the Earthquake/ Despues del Terremoto (1979), she has produced and directed over a dozen works that reveal her signature hybrid style as a visual artist, investigative journalist, and activist. Portillo’s fourteen completed films include the Academy Award® and Emmy® Award nominated Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (1986), La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1988), Columbus on Trial (1992), The Devil Never Sleeps (1994), Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (1999), My McQueen (2004), and her new short film, Al Más Allá (2008). Her most recent feature-length film, Señorita Extraviada (2001), a documentary about the disappearance and death of young women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, received a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Havana International Film Festival, the Nestor Almendros Award at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and an Ariel, the Mexican Academy of Film Award. http://www.lourdesportillo.com/

Leticia Roa Nixon (Ahdanah) majored in Journalism in Mexico, her home country. In 1985 she moved to Philadelphia and began to document the Latino communities through her news reporting. Thanks to JUNTOS, a grassroots organization in South Philadelphia helping Latino immigrants, she took a video course where she met Laura Deutch and Carlos Pascual. After receiving a 2009 Art and Change Grant from the Leeway Foundaton, Leticia, Laura and Carlos produced the documentary El Sol Sale para Todos based on interviews with South Philadelphia Mexican residents. This is a testimony of their dreams, concerns, struggles and challenges as immigrants.

Laura Deutch is an educator, artist and activist interested in telling community stories and social histories utilizing multi-channel environments and participatory processes. She is a MFA candidate in the Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University and has a BA in Media Studies from Ithaca College.

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Producers’ Forums are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Independence Foundation.