CINE NUEVA ONDA
Experimental LatinX and Latin American Film
Cine Nueva Onda | 2020
Thank you for joining us in our first event of the year. We hope you were as inspired as we were!
Cine Nueva Onda featured two films by director, visual artist, filmmaker, sound artist, and performer Natalia Lassalle-Morillo. The Puerto Rican-born and Los Angeles-based director presented her films Retiro and La Ruta.
Retiro is a multimedia documentary and performance project that reconstructs memories of the director’s mother through interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and reenactments performed by the director herself.
La Ruta is an experimental documentary that depicts the now abandoned infrastructure, natural landscapes, and off-road sites of Puerto Rico’s Panoramic Route.
ABout the Films:
La Ruta (2018) | 30 mins.
La Ruta visually traces the now debilitated infrastructure, unkempt natural landscapes and off-road sites of Puerto Rico’s Panoramic Route. The brainchild of the first democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico Luís Muñoz Marín, the Panoramic Route was intended to provide a way for locals and tourists to connect to the island’s traditional heartland and was part of an agenda that sought to modernize the country through the construction of infrastructure and social programs. The construction was estimated at a cost of 4 million dollars, but it cost taxpayers 20 million dollars upon its completion in 1975. This historical framework led the artists Christopher Gregory, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, and Erika P. Rodriguez to an investigation and eventually a road trip through the Panoramic Route. The body of work developed by the collective explores how progress is defined by the residents of the towns adjacent to the route and examines the spaces that conform it. Based on interviews gathered throughout the journey of the route, La Ruta questions the colony’s utopian idea of progress and reflects on the island’s historical and collective memory.
Retiro (2019) | 39 mins.
Retiro focuses on collaboration between Lassalle-Morillo and her mother, Gloria Morillo. After her grandmother’s death, Lassalle-Morillo interviews her mother who was 62 at the time about her process of grieving, her daily life, her memories growing up in Puerto Rico, and most importantly about the transformation her body is undergoing at this age and her outlook on the future. After several months of interviews, Lassalle-Morillo and her mother decide to make a film together. Gloria has total narrative and dramatic authorship of the script since the film’s focus is not its veracity, but rather how Gloria decides to remember and rewrite this memory. Gloria also has authority on the design, stylistic and casting choices. She casts her daughter in the role of young Gloria in this rescripting of her life, and through Lassalle-Morillo’s embodiment of her mother’s memory, Gloria is able to witness and synthesize the narrative of her biography in order to realign her relationship to her past.
About The filmmaker
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo’s work focuses on the convergence of traditional narratives, autobiography and re-imagined history in live and permanent artistic mediums.
Born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, she received her BFA from the Experimental Theatre Wing at New York University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from the California Institute of the Arts. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Miami Light Project, the Miami Theatre Center, the Fonderie Darling in Montréal, and Konvent in Catalonia, Spain. Recent projects include an adaptation of Sophokles' Antigone, which premiered at the Walt Disney Modular Theatre in California, and a presentation of her documentary and performance project Retiro, which premiered at the Seoul Museum of Art in Seoul, Korea. Her work has been shown in galleries, theatres and venues in Miami, Berlin, Spain, Korea, Los Angeles, New York, and Puerto Rico.
Event Details
When:
Thursday, 30 January 2020
6:30PM
Where:
Luckman Intimate Theatre
California State University, Los Angeles
5151 State University Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90032
Cost:
FREE EVENT
ALL AGES WELCOME
Cine Nueva Onda is a free event co-presented by the Department of Television, Film, and Media Studies of the California State University, Los Angeles.