FESTIVAL ’90

Highlights of Los Angeles Festival’s films and videos focusing on 25 Pacific Rim countries are reviewed here:

The Principal Enemy

Bolivia Sunday at 3 p.m. at Melnitz Theater, UCLA Shot while Bolivian director Jorge Sanjines was in political exile in Peru, and set in a mountain Indian community, this is a fierce mixture of balladlike epic and Marxist agitprop. The story is fairly simple-minded, rolling along in classic action-reaction structure. A vile landowner and his brutal overseer steal a peasant’s only cow and then behead him; the peasantry rise up and arrest the landowner; a corrupt magistrate frees him and throws the peasantry in jail; saintly guerrillas bring the killers before a revolutionary tribunal, etc. etc., right up to the entrance of American military advisers. (The Principal Enemy?) The characters are stock villains and mass heroes, the dialogue almost wholly stiff and expository. Yet Sanjines is a poet of sorts. His monochrome landscapes have raw beauty; his violently moralistic tale is done without apology or compromise. It packs a punch.