Great American Cultural Heroism, Beyond Chicano Culture

Reduced to a sound bite, the résumé of great American playwright/film director Luis Valdez can be summed up in two prominent and influential works: the Zoot Suit and the film La Bamba. Those record-breaking and culturally expansive achievements would be enough to earn him a lofty status in American stage and screen annals. But there is much more to the Valdez story, reaching back through UFW farmworker struggles and other highwater marks in Chicano history and pride over the past half century, a saga which David Alvarado’s enthralling new documentary American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez does a great service in bringing to the screen and to public light.

The documentary, which won two awards at its premiere at the Sundance Festival a week ago, has lit up the SBIFF screens and instantly taken its place as one of this year’s festival’s hot properties. Edward James Olmos serves as a narrator and storyteller in the film’s structure, an echo of his key role in the epicenter of Zoot Suit, and Valdez himself, now 85, speaks eloquently of his trajectory, from humble origins to his center of the Chicano power train in the ‘70s and ‘80s. “My words speak for themselves,” he says early in the film, “but they also speak for a lot of people.”

Son of farmworkers in Delano, California, he met Cesar Chavez and was in the first wave of farmworker and UFW action in the fields and beyond, heading up a guerrilla theater company dealing with and satirizing the exploitive ranchers and company forces. Zoot Suit became a huge sensation at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, although a move to Broadway met with show-closing critical trashing. But he was on the ascent in terms of public profile, bringing the story of Ritchie Valens to the screen in La Bamba, which remains the most popular Chicano film in history. Los Lobos shot up the charts with their variation on the theme song, originally a vintage son jarocho folk song and Valens’s defining hit.

In a post-screening Q&A, director Alvarado spoke about the irony that, following the sensation of La Bamba, Valdez wasn’t showered with other offers. It was his only completed film. “It’s a real testament to the ongoing problem with Chicano culture in the wider media world,” Alvarado commented. “He should have been offered ten projects after La Bamba.”

There are local Santa Barbara links in the project, including insider interview material with La Bamba producer Taylor Hackford, who was raised here, and the fact that UCSB was a source of a bounty of archival materials for this film and future purposes. 

The subject of ICE naturally came up during the audience question portion of the session, relating to the main points in a film about Chicano power and human rights for the Latinx community. Alvarado explained that the original conception of the film started three years ago; “I wanted it to be about this painful quest for belonging in America — that’s the context I always saw for it. This was when Biden was president, and we thought we’d never hear from Trump again, and so on.

“When Trump came back into office and then ICE raids started to happen, we were still in the edit, and it became a question in the edit room, ‘Should we just show some ICE footage? Should we show how this interacts with our politics today?’ We decided very intentionally not to, because if it’s true in the larger sense — the perennial truth that people belong here — that’s what America is supposed to be.”

Which is to say, as fine and moving a doc as it is, American Pachuco is more than just a movie. It strikes resonant chords with the current zeitgeist even as it traces back over a lifetime and legacy.

Impersonator In Person

My favorite moment in Song Sung Blue arrives in a presumably drug-induced episode in which Claire Sardina, played by Kate Hudson, launches into Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams” on an imaginary stage, singing with a potent Patsy-esque musicality and assurance attesting to Hudson’s gift for songs sung true. Then, reality intrudes, and her concerned family wakes her up on the Wisconsin suburban lawn. It’s a suitably, weirdly dreamy moment in an otherwise fairly formulaic movie.

Song Sung Blue is a true story–based saga about the life and livelihood of music icon impersonators, in particular, Neil Diamond. It delivers a mainstream motherlode of emotion buttons and won’t be confused with Harmony Korine’s eccentric impersonator tale, Mr. Lonely.

Hudson, 46, qualifies as a princess-turned-queen of Hollywood feel-good qualities, and has been acknowledged by the Academy for her Song Sung Blue performance in the Best Actress category. Given that timely hook, she was the affable subject of a cozy SBIFF tribute night at the Arlington Theatre with her pal and Montecitan Gwyneth Paltrow ready with a trophy at the end.

Asked by moderator Scott Feinberg about the realm of the romcom, a place she has lived many times, Hudson asserted, “I think it’s the hardest genre to get right. The great ones are those we keep going back to, like a warm blanket. You can just go for the standard rules of the genre, but I’m interested in films where the goal is to make a great movie, regardless of the genre.

“I love movies, no matter what genre, if they get people in the seats and create a great collective experience.”

(See Leslie Dinaberg’s full report here).

Windswept, Storm-warned Soul on a Brink

One of the more poetic and experimental films in a festival lineup lacking that end-of-the-cinema spectrum is Yunan, created with a patient hand by Ameer Fakher Eldin, a Germany-based director born in Ukraine to Syrian parents from the Golan Heights. That mixed heritage is reflected in Yunan, the second film in Eldin’s trilogy, following his acclaimed The Stranger (al-Gharīb), Palestinian Oscar submission in 2021. The trilogy deals with Arabic people in exile, a theme conveyed both clearly and subtly in this tale of a blocked and lonely Lebanese writer in Germany on the brink.

Lebanese actor George Khabbaz stars as Munir, a man facing storm warnings both interior and exterior. Khabbaz radiates a poised but imperiled calm as a man in crisis. Told to take time off by his doctor to relieve stress, Munir ventures away from the city to a definitively remote locale — the tiny island of Langeneß in the North Sea. Wandering the island, he battles inner demons — and the impulse to kill himself (as in the films Taste of Cherry and Japón), and the film oscillates between extended scenes with the soul-searching hero and the mysterious fable story told to him by his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother.

Munir finds a surrogate mother figure of sorts in the gentle and innkeeper (great German actress Hannah Schygulla, of Fassbinder films fame), and his happiest moment in the film comes while dancing to Arabic music with her in the local pub. A collapse and rebirth follow.

Yunan is definitely slow-moving and a meditative film, in which the “action” aspect consists of the whims of the weather and intermittent waves of impressive, impressionistic music (by Jordanian-Canadian composer Suad Lakišić Bushnaq). The film asks us to meet it on its own reflective and dialogue-sparse terms, and to appreciate the powerful role of the setting’s rugged, unforgiving, but also healing nature — almost literally a character itself. Landscapes of the soul and outer edges comprise the domain here, to mystical and ultimately cathartic ends.

Recommended Fare in TBA Land

Day ten of the festival is a bittersweet moment, but one of the sweet parts is the TBA factor, the time when open slots are filled with some of the best and most popular films of the festival. Saturday’s line-up is a star-studded list of options for festival-goers, who may have been shut out of earlier screenings or otherwise steered towards.

Here is a list of the films that impressed me most during the fest, an embarrassment of riches to be worked out on a personalized grid.

Cuba & Alaska (Yegor Troyanovsky; Ukraine — creative documentary about lives inside the Ukraine war)
Silent Rebellion (Marie-Elsa Sgualdo; Switzerland — one of the very best of the fest)
Abril (Hernán Jiménez; Costa Rica — romcom with artful edges)
You Had to Be There (Nick Davis; Canada — historical doc, about SNL’s Canadian seedbed)
A Life Illuminated (Tasha Van Zandt; U.S. — doc about famed bioluminescence-curious marine biologist Dr. Edith Widder)
Lost Land (Akio Fujimoto; powerful tale of Rohingya children’s refugee flight)
#Viral (King Bai; Japan — tangled tale of social media mayhem)
A Pale View of Hills (Kei Ishikawa; Japan — engaging adaptation of Kazuo Ichiguo’s novel)
Little Lorraine (Andy Hines; Canada — emotional saga of drug-running in Cape Breton)
The Yellow Tie (Serge Ioan Celebidachi; Romanian — epic biopic of Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache)
Versailles (Andres Clariond Rangel; Mexico — wicked political satire, with Trump-ian echoes)
Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher (Dayna Goldfine, Dan Geller — excellent chronicle of a music legend at many pivotal junctures of pop history) 
Tenor – my name is Pati (Rebecca Tansley — warm portrait of famed Samoan operatic tenor Penne Pati, tethered to family and community)