In Suchitoto, a village in El Salvador, Alejandro Cotto (1927-2015) is celebrating his 63rd birthday while the youth are celebrating the end of the nightmare of the civil war. Cotto, a pioneer of Salvadoran cinema speaks to Escalón about cinema in the name of Third World artists who wrestle with the paucity of means. Alejandro Cotto recounts not only the greatness and misery of his career, but also the horror of war, the fate of his village, and the path of his dreams. After all, it takes a big dreamer like him to envision making “great cinema” in the depths of a village in Central America. Escalón uses excerpts from Cotto’s films extensively, demonstrating the versatility of his filmography, including the last film, Universo menor, started in 1979 that remains unfinished, in which Cotto films his passion, the popular rural festivals of El Salvador

In 1968 a wave of student protests broke out across the world , drawing inspiration and breath from the Civil Rights movement and the student movement against the Vietnam War. Everywhere in the world, youth rose to reject the social, political, and cultural premises of the world recreated after the Second World War. They aspired for a new society achieved through an endemic and protean protest, carried by a new generation critical of the established way of life…a way of life deemed as colonial and authoritarian, fixed and hierarchical, liberticidal, and moralizing. Between nostalgia and overly ideological attacks, how do we look at this global movement 50 years later? What is this bygone era’s legacy? The recent uprisings that invaded the streets of big cities (Paris, London, Rome, Dakar, San Francisco, Beirut, etc.) are countless, so much so that the little Parisian May of 1968 seems almost anecdotal. It is a moment of global change that this film proposes to revisit. Imbued with the fever of the decade, it tells the story of the mad rush of euphoria and violence when everything seemed possible but whose legacy still divides people.