Longtime documentary editor Maureen Gosling's 16mm portrait of the thriving matriarchal culture of Juchitan, a city of 100,000 in the center of notoriously macho Mexico, is at heart a socialist realist travelogue in the tradition of Orson Welles' unfinished
It's All True, shot in Brazil in 1940, or Sergei Eisenstein's 1940
Time in the Sun (compiled from footage shot for the never-completed
Que Viva Mexico! in 1931 and '32) — Gosling even incorporates some of Eisenstein's shimmering black-and-white footage of women in traditional garb. But while the subject is potentially fascinating, Gosling's unfocused, sluggish film is a case study in miss...
Released:
2000
Rated:
NR
Length:
74 mins