September 15, if you didn’t know, marked the beginning of National Hispanic Heritage Month. That can only mean one thing: The elected officials of Arizona are taking a 30-day break from demonizing and disenfranchising the state’s Latinos. Really? Well, no. The thing most closely identified with mid-September is, in fact, the San Francisco Latino Film Festival.
My stab at political humor is prompted by Ari Luis Palos and Eric Isabel McGinnis’s deeply sympathetic and righteously indignant documentary Precious Knowledge (Sept. 17 at the Opera Plaza Cinema in SF and Sept. 20 at MACLA in San Jose). The film contrasts the palpable value of Ethnic (also known as Raza) Studies classes in Tucson high schools with the devious, calculated efforts of Arizona lawmakers to eliminate the curriculum.
It’s patently clear that the politicians suffer from an irrational fear of a brown planet. What’s open to debate is whether these carefully soft-spoken, middle-aged white folks sincerely believe that Raza Studies is a dangerous fount of Leninism (what else could a Che poster represent?) and hatred, or if they are exceedingly skilled at concealing their function as puppets for unseen — and genuinely anti-democratic — forces. It’s often difficult to ascribe motives to strangers glimpsed in a film, but you’ll find it hard to resist in this case, whether you catch Precious Knowledge at the festival or on PBS at some point down the road.
Reading people’s faces provides a good deal of the pleasure, as well as the melancholy undertow, of another worthy documentary, The Chilean Building (Sept. 18 at the Opera Plaza). Filmmaker Macarena Aguilo was one of 60 or so small children whose parents returned to Chile from exile in Europe to fight the Pinochet dictatorship in the late ’70s. The kids were left behind, for their safety, in the care of other Chileans, first in a house outside Paris and then in an apartment building in Havana.
