Worth the trip: Side Streets, above, and Road Dogz are among Vistas' notable entries.
Road Dogz
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Opens at 7:30 p.m. October 12 with a screening of Side Streets at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood. Films will screen October 13-15. An all-access festival pass can be purchased for $70, but weekend and individual passes are also available. For a complete schedule and ticket prices, call (214) 220-3260.
DMA; the Medallion 5 Theater, 125 Medallion Center, Skillman Road and Northwest Highway; and the Bob Hope Theater on the SMU Campus
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Under California: The Limit of Time The most striking and stirring film of this year belongs to last year: An award-winner on the festival circuit in 1999, Carlos Bolado’s work is that rare movie that lingers days after it ends, if only because it’s so easy to forget how elegiac and poetic this medium can be in these pedestrian, superficial times. To watch it is to wake up, to tingle, to bask in a filmmaker’s vision and joy; Bolado has made painting and poem, using celluloid only as a starting place. (Rare is the film that inspires such hyperbole, much less withstands it.) Under California is the tale of an artist’s journey south and beyond: Damien (Damian Alcazar) has loaded his truck, left Laguna Beach, abandoned his patient and pregnant wife, and driven to Baja California to find the grave of his grandmother in San Francisco de la Sierra, home of legendary—if not downright mythical—cave paintings. He’s chasing ghosts and running from them: He can’t erase the image of another pregnant woman slamming against his windshield; though the accident was no fault of his own—she was very likely sneaking across the border in the dead of night—he’s overcome with guilt, and this odyssey is his penance. Even his wife demands he make such a trip: “You have to come back to yourself,” she tells him in a cassette she’s inserted into his car stereo. She wants him to return, but not as “half a man.” The film’s first half contains dialogue enough to fill, maybe, a handful of pages; Bolado, who makes his directorial debut, lets the sights and silence fill in the blanks—the chasms in Damien’s broken heart. (Alcazar, sporting a circular tattoo on his forehead, need say little; his damp eyes communicate just enough.) But Damien’s journey doesn’t follow a straight line: He torches his truck on the beach (as though he were making a sacrifice, he destroys it in a ring of fire) and walks along the sand and sea, leaving sculptures made of shells and whale bones along the way; it’s as though he leaves behind him a trail of shrines that, when complete, make him whole once more. Not surprisingly, Bolado has been compared to the likes of Buñuel and Wenders along the festival circuit; he deserves such accolades for his ability to reveal what he need not say. Like Buñuel and Wenders at their best, Bolado is a poet speaking only between the lines; we fill in what we bring, and we revel in what we take away. October 13, 7:45 p.m., Medallion; October 15, 5:15 p.m., Medallion. (RW)
We Shall Not Abandon A sterling illustration of the difference between being “religious” and being “spiritual” can be found in We Shall Not Abandon, Jeffrey and Tanya Reschke’s quietly compelling documentary that illustrates a mid-’90s Chicago cultural clash. The filmmakers flash a discriminating skill for building fact on tasty fact as though they were the authors of a prize-winning newspaper series. The conflict we speak of here is not between ethnicities, but between the aloof and bureaucratic Roman Catholic Church and the Latino congregation of St. Francis of Assisi Cathedral. On the west side of Chicago, the city’s Mexican-American population sprung up around this institution beginning in the mid-1920s—commentators assert that its fame spread to Mexico by the 1950s, and actually drew people with promise for support while an American life could be established. When in 1994 the Chicago archdiocese wanted to close St. Francis and merge it with Holy Family Church down the street, the congregation rallied, first with 4,000 signatures and then with live demonstrations outside the mansion (yep, they call it a mansion, and it looks like one to us) of Joseph Cardinal Bernadin, Chicago’s thin-skinned archbishop. We Shall Not Abandon incorporates a surplus of TV news coverage of the two-year battle to save St. Francis, as the congregation is at first ignored, and then outright lied to by the archdiocese. A demolition crew begins work surreptitiously, in the middle of the night, after parishioners have been promised “a stay of execution,” and dozens rush to plant themselves in a twenty-below winter inside the building. For those of us who’ve always been suspicious of The Church (any Church) as both business and administration, We Shall Not Abandon is a rousing reminder that the soul of religion is in the individual. October 13, 5 p.m., Medallion; October 14, 6 p.m., Medallion. Screens with Forgotten Americans both days. (JF)
