The very strange Mariano (Noé Hernandez) rules a bizarre underground lair in Emiliano Rocha Minter’s WE ARE THE FLESH
WE ARE THE FLESH (TENEMOS LA CARNE) (Emiliano Rocha Minter, 2016)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, January 20
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
In his debut feature, twenty-five-year-old writer-director Emiliano Rocha Minter paints a horrifying vision of modern-day Mexico in We Are the Flesh. The film, a hit at festivals around the world, takes place in a kind of surreal, postapocalyptic underground hellmouth ruled by lunatic ogre Mariano (Noé Hernandez), who is delighted when siblings Lucio (Diego Gamaliel) and Fauna (María Evoli) come stumbling into his lair. As the three of them build a bizarre womblike structure, they engage in taboo acts that can best be described as foul, vile, disgusting, putrid, and demented — as well as strangely beautiful and maddeningly erotic — luridly photographed by Yollótl Alvarado on eerie sets designed by Manuela García. Esteban Aldrete’s threateningly pulsating score is interrupted by moans, screams, and occasional songs, several of which transform into oddly beguiling music videos. Minter also edited the film, with Yibran Assuad, maintaining a steady, sinister pace in which the audience awaits the next bit of craziness with both gleeful revulsion and terrifying excitement. Dialogue is limited and eccentric but gets the point across: “You were chosen by chance,” Mariano says, “and remember that chance is the most dangerous criminal who has roamed the earth.”
Mexican filmmaker Emiliano Rocha Minter’s debut feature is a violent, erotic fairy tale where anything can happen, and does
The film, which deals with various kinds of hunger as well as birth and rebirth, was inspired by the stories and pictures in sensationalist rags that are sold at newsstands throughout Mexico. “These newspapers remain unmatched as a gaze into a country that finds its pleasures in Hell,” Julio Chavezmontes explains in his producer’s statement. “This is the reality that Tenemos la Carne has dared to address. This is a film that is in total synchrony with its time and the ravaged country that gave it birth. It is a fearless, unprecedented vision of Mexico.” It’s also a film that goes where few films venture — with good reason, of course; watching it is like reading one of Charles Bukoswki’s more depraved stories: You know you should stop and put the book down, but you just can’t, in the same way you can’t turn away from Minter’s film. The dark tale evokes the work of such auteurs as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kenneth Anger, Gaspar Noé, Dario Argento, and Carlos Reygadas, yet it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen, a hallucinatory adult fairy tale with a twist ending that brings it all home. Opening January 20 at Cinema Village, We Are the Flesh packs a whole lot of punch into its maniacal eighty minutes.
In the 1970s and 1980s, sports and politics began to mix in unsavory ways, from the horrific massacre of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972 to boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Summer Games. But sports can also lift nations and their place in the world in remarkable ways. Three years before the “Miracle on Ice,” when the U.S. Olympic hockey team won the Gold Medal in Lake Placid, a previously unsuccessful Israeli basketball team was attempting to pull off a miracle of its own at the 1976-77 European Cup Championship. Writer-director Dani Menkin tells the improbable story of Maccabi Tel Aviv in On the Map, an exciting, superbly made documentary about a group of dedicated men whose on-court efforts were about more than going after the cup. “It’s not just basketball,” point guard Bob Griffin explains. Menkin mixes contemporary and archival footage for maximum impact; seeing the surviving members of the team donning their jerseys again and watching themselves in the biggest international game an Israeli team has ever participated in is tremendously moving. “It was something so unbelievable, so wishful, a great, golden place in sports history,” says sportscaster Alex Giladi, who took much of the amazing footage shown in the film. Fascinating insights emerge as Menkin speaks with Griffin, power forward Eric Minkin, forward Lou Silver, guard Miki Berkovich, center Aulcie Perry, superstar point guard and captain Tal Brody, and Jennifer Boatwright, the widow of small forward Jim Boatwright, in addition to former Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps, Hall of Famer Bill Walton, who played with Brody on the U.S. National Team, former NBA commissioner David Stern, NBA commentator Simmy Reguer, and broadcaster Gideon Hod. Among those putting Maccabi’s battles against Italy’s Mobilgirgi Varèse, Spain’s Real Madrid, and Russia’s CSKA Moscow Red Army into political perspective are former finance minister Yair Lapid, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, Maccabi president Shimon Mizrahi, and longtime Soviet prisoner and activist Natan Sharansky.
“We’re fooling with Mother Nature,” Montana organic wheat farmer and U.S. senator Jon Tester says in Seed: The Untold Story, a crunchy activist documentary opening September 23 at Cinema Village. Produced, directed, and edited by Jon Betz and Taggart Siegel, the film focuses on how ninety-four percent of vegetable seed varieties have disappeared over the last hundred years and how farming communities around the world are now trying to save and protect seeds while battling the government and such chemical companies as Monsanto. The facts are staggering; the number of varieties of cabbage has gone from 544 to 28, beets 288 to 17, cauliflower 158 to 9, artichokes 34 to 2, and asparagus 46 to 1. Betz and Siegel, who previously collaborated on 
In Dani Menkin’s Is That You?, young film student Myla (Naruna Kaplan de Macedo) is making a documentary, asking strangers what they regret. If she asked me, I might just have told her that I regret having watched Is That You? Nominated for an Israeli Academy Award for Best Picture and winner of Best Indie Film, Dani Menkin’s Is That You? is a convoluted road-trip movie that manipulates its paper-thin plot until almost none of it makes sense. Israeli film, television, and stage favorite Alon Aboutboul (London Has Fallen, The Dark Knight Rises) stars as Ronnie, an outdated analog man in an ever-more-digital world. After losing his job as a projectionist in an Israeli art house, Ronnie heads to the States, determined to find his lost love, Rachel, who he has not seen in nearly forty years. He picks up an old used car (no fancy new styles for him) from his brother, Jacob (Rani Bleier), and sets out on his mission. The lemon soon breaks down, and Ronnie is offered help by Myla, whose film is called The Road Not Taken. Moved by Ronnie’s story, Myla joins him on his journey, taking her brother’s SUV, without permission. As Ronnie and Myla try to track down Rachel, who can’t seem to settle down in one place for very long, they stop along the way so Myla can interview people on the street and in their homes, getting them to share what they would change in their lives if they could. But the hardest person to get to open up is Ronnie himself.
