Directed by Rodrigo Reyes • 2020 • Mexico
To reflect on the five-hundred-year anniversary of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, director Rodrigo Reyes offers a bold hybrid-cinema experience exploring the brutal legacy of colonialism in contemporary Mexico. Through the eyes of a ghostly conquistador, 499 recreates Hernán Cortés’s journey from the coasts of Veracruz to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the site of contemporary Mexico City. As the anachronistic fictional character interacts with real-life victims of Mexico’s failed drug wars and Indigenous communities in resistance, the filmmaker portrays the country’s current humanitarian crisis as part of a vicious and unfinished colonial project, still in motion nearly five hundred years later. Provocative, unique, and strikingly cinematic, 499 mixes nonfictional and performative elements with conventions of the road movie to show how past traumas continue to shape contemporary reality.
Up Next in 21st Century Cinema
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Take Out
Directed by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou • 2004 • United States
Starring Charles Jang, Jeng-Hua Yu, Wang-Thye LeeThe American dream has rarely seemed so far away as in Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou’s raw, vérité TAKE OUT, an immersion in the life of an undocumented Chinese immigrant struggli...
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Happy Hour
Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi • 2015 • Japan
Starring Sachie Tanaka, Hazuki Kikuchi, Maiko MiharaA powerful affirmation of the immersive potential of cinema, HAPPY HOUR is a slow-burning epic chronicling the emotional journey of four thirtysomething women in the misty seaside city of Kobe, Japa...
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Karen Dalton: In My Own Time
Directed by Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz • 2020 • United States
Starring Nick Cave, Lacy J. Dalton, Rick MoodyWith her plaintive, bluer-than-blue voice, singer Karen Dalton rose to prominence within the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s—though her rough-edged authenticity stood ou...
