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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France
Directed by Bruno Dumont • 2021 • France, Italy
Starring Léa Seydoux, Blanche Gardin, Benjamin BiolayLéa Seydoux brilliantly holds the center of Bruno Dumont’s unexpected, unsettling film, which starts out as a satire of the contemporary news media before steadily spiraling out into something r...
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Mysterious Object at Noon
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul • 2000 • Thailand
Starring Duangjai Hiransri, Somsri Pinyopol, Kannikar NarongApichatpong Weerasethakul brought an appetite for experimentation to Thai cinema with his debut feature, an uncategorizable work that refracts documentary impressions of his homel...
