Montezuma's Revenge

By: Dzimas

We all know the story of Montezuma’s Revenge. Here are a few movies decrying colonialism in Latin America and the impact US politics has had in the Americas. If there is a beginning point, Que Viva Mexico! is as good a place to start as any. This is Sergei Eisenstein’s opus to the Mexican Revolution, which he did in conjunction with Upton and Mary Sinclair in the 1930s.

It is worth looking at this impasse in both a historical and contemporary sense. I thought one of the most evocative movies made in recent years was Cabeza de Vaca, which charts the extraordinary adventures of a Spanish conquistador shipwrecked in Florida in the Sixteenth century and eventually finding his way to Mexico City. There is also Werner Herzog’s breathtaking Agguire: The Wrath of God. Then you have contemporary classic slike El Norte, which best captures the nature of illegal immigration, and Jonathon Demme’s fascinating documentary, The Agronomist, on Jean Leopold Dominique, who hosted Haiti’s first independent radio station. Recently, I saw Luis Mandoki’s Innocent Voices, which goes much further than did Stone’s 1986 Salvador, in bringing home this awful war.

Some movies not listed in Criterion that are worth watching,

The Panama Deception , a documentary of the US Invasion in 1989
The Border , Jack Nicholson as a border control guard
Comandante , Oliver Stone’s biopic of Fidel Castro
Old Gringo , based on Carlos Fuentes’ classic novel
Cuban Story , fascinating documentary of the revolution by Errol Flynn in 1959
Romero , with Raul Julia as Archbishop Oscar Romero who dared to speak out against the American backed government of El Salvador.

Here is short list of movies about US/Latin American relations over the centuries, in no particular order,