Feature film
Mestizo
Mario Handler · 1988
Synopsis
In a village on the Venezuelan coast, divided between fishermen and large haciendas, Aquiles Vargas, a white aristocrat whose fortune has declined, stands opposed to Cruz, a poor Black fisherwoman, the mother of his only son. This mixed-race son, José, seeks to find who he is between the two worlds of his parents; he runs up against the social and sexual conflicts of the village, power, the law and custom, and his relations with his father as with his mother become strained.
Context
The screenplay, by the director and Antonio Larreta, adapts the first novel by Guillermo Meneses, published in Caracas in 1942, which made a mestizo the hero of a realist tale of the margins. The film places its drama in a precise racial and social setting, and marks in its author a move into fiction after a body of documentary work. The Brazilian actress Zezé Motta plays Cruz, alongside Marcos Moreno, Aldo Tulian and Hilda Vera. Co-produced with Cuba, it runs a little over eighty minutes; an American distributor of films of the African diaspora circulates it with English subtitles.
Who it is for
A drama in Spanish of a little under an hour and a half, about skin colour and parentage in a village in Venezuela.
Prizes and reception
Taken up in the series devoted to Afro-Latin American cinema in the United States, it shows the other side of a filmmaker known for his documentaries.
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