Archives: Movies

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.

Lake Managua holds tremendous significance for Nicaraguans, it is the polluted and stagnant lake where the ashes of the revolutionary, Augusto Sandino, were thrown after his assassination. Nicaragua remains in a state of of unresolved suspension, the war in Nicaragua ended with negotiations for which opposing factions never provided a public explanation. Narrated in the first person, the film blends archival footage with dazzling landscape captures. Filmmaker Mercedes Moncada focuses on her personal narrative of the brutality of the Somoza dictatorship that followed the Sandinista revolution in 1979 and the corruption of Sandinista leaders who eventually betrayed the revolution. In Magic Words, Lake Managua appears like a metaphor for the rotten legacy of corrupt regimes that have marked the modern history of Nicaragua.

The Immortal tells the story of the Rivera family,  torn apart by war in Nicaragua. Trapped in the crossfire between the Sandinistas and the Contras, the Contras seized the father, two teenage sons and the teenage daughter. The mother managed to escape with the youngest son before the Contras burned their house. The family was separated until the end of the conflict. Their reunion confronted  the open wounds of the war, and all that continues to tear apart the fabric of Nicaraguan society.