All Grown Up
Gloria Bessenbacher has lived in Kansas City for 27 years but hails from Mexico City. She watched international films growing up, but after marrying an American and moving to Kansas City, part of the “culture shock” was the dearth of films from her country.
Witnessing the recent success of the Mexican films Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien has been gratifying. But what makes Bessenbacher even happier is that the Latin American Cinema Festival of Kansas City she established begins its eleventh year Saturday, September 7, at the Rio Theater.
The festival is Kansas City’s oldest of any kind. Bessenbacher recalls the sharp rebuke she received from local theater owners when she asked why so few Latin films were reaching area screens.
“They said, ‘There’s no market, no public,'” she says. And, she remembers, the foreign films being brought to town were either French or Italian. “Seldom would you see even a film from Spain. So I thought, Maybe I can do it, to fulfill the need for myself but also to provide an avenue to show how Latin American people live, their language and customs. I’ve realized it’s become quite a cultural and educational benefit.”
Launching this year’s festival is the Peruvian El Bien Esquivo, directed by Augusto Tamayo. Press materials promise the qualities of a romance novel mixed with an adventure yarn set in the seventeenth century. From Spain is Flores De Otro Mundo (Flowers From Another World); directed by Iciar Bollain, the contemporary story about dreamers draws its characters from “a village lacking both marrying women and a future.” Ernesto Rimoch’s El Anzuelo (The Bait) is “a comedy in which a middle-class girl marries a well-to-do young man,” but the day loses its idyllic glow when it’s time to pay the band. And from Argentina comes Gabriela David’s Taxi un Encuentro (Taxi Encounter), in which each new fare steers the movie in another direction.
Entre La Tarde Y La Noche (Between Evening and Night), which was the only film available for preview, stars Angelica Aragon as an embittered writer named Minerva. After breaking up with her lover in the United States, she goes south of the border and holes up in a seaside hotel. The proprietor’s daughter prompts a flood of memories, which takes the film back to Minerva’s chaotic childhood.
The young Minerva is motherless, and her father is an abusive fisherman. The only blessings in her life are her grandmother and Uncle Alberto, a lothario who drops in and out of town but always brings elaborate presents. Before the film concludes with the adult Minerva’s discovery of a devastating family secret, her pubescent counterpart’s traumas are balanced by dirty books and funny dreams about cliff-diving nuns.
Directed by Oscar Blancarte, the film’s cinematography is a bit muddy, but the coastal town where it was filmed can’t help but offer gorgeous landscapes. There’s a throbbing emptiness to Aragon’s Minerva, made completely true by the child who plays her as a schoolgirl, Martha Lorena Osuna. For all she endures and witnesses, it’s amazing the girl grows to become a woman.
