CalArtians’ Films Screen at Guggenheim Museum

In conjunction with the Guggenheim Museum’s ongoing art exhibit Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, CalArts alumni Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias’ (Film/Video 13) and Alexandra Cuesta’s (Film/Video MFA 09) films are screening as part of the film series Tropical Uncanny: Latin Tropes and Mythologies on Sept. 12. The day’s theme, “Nueva York,” gathers shorts that provide an off-kilter portrait of New York.

Arias’ You Look Like a Carriage that Not Even the Oxen Can Stop (Pareces una carreta de esa que no la para ni lo’ bueye) tells the story of a Dominican woman and her daughter sharing an isolated life in the outskirts of New York City, speaking only Caribbean Spanish and a few English phrases they remember. The trailer for the film is above.

Cuesta’s Recordando el Ayer contemplates memory and identity as it films Jackson Heights, home to a large population of Latin American immigrants. It explores how the New York City neighborhood slowly begins to mirror not only the places where its current inhabitants are from, but a past built on collective memory. 

Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today gathers Latin American artists’ responses to contemporary Latin America, investigating complex, shared realities that have been influenced by colonial and modern histories, repressive governments, economic crises and social inequality, as well as by concurrent periods of regional economic wealth, development and progress.