Our Guide to This Year's OC Film Fiesta

Texan singers, art docs, resistance fighters, James Dean, silent films and Juan Gabriel: These are just some of the thrilling characters and topics gracing the screen at this year's OC Film Fiesta, which kicks off Thursday, Oct. 13. This always-evolving festival runs longer than most, spanning four weekends this month with lesser-known cultural flicks and fascinating documentaries that otherwise wouldn't get the wide-release treatment they deserve (and did we mention James Dean?). Consider this your cinematic passport to global, under-the-radar gems you can brag about seeing to your other film-geek friends. Here are this year's highlights.

SILENT FILMS
Carl Dreyer's 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, with the magnetic performance of lead actress Renée Falconetti, is probably the most-screened silent feature ever, and it closes the festival at Bowers Museum. But we guarantee you've never heard of the 1917 Mexican silent film Tepeyac, a quasi-religious love story about a woman who seeks spiritual guidance from La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgin Mary for Catholic Mexicans, after she learns her boyfriend is in peril. Miraculously, he survives, and the grateful couple visit the Virgin at her holy altar at La Villa de Tepeyac. The screening notably coincides with the Bowers' exhibition on La Virgen de Guadalupe, “Images in Colonial Mexico.”

Then, of course, there is Wara Wara, a 1930 silent film imported from Bolivia. Directed by famed Bolivian filmmaker Jose Maria Velasco Maidana, Wara Wara tracks a rocky love story between the titular character, an Incan princess played by Juanita Taillansier, and a Spanish conquistador during the conquest of the Inca Empire.

RIP, JUAN GABRIEL
Though he only appears for a limited cameo, Juan Gabriel's presence is felt and heard throughout the opening-night feature, ¿Que Le Dijiste a Dios? The musical comedy, which includes many of Gabriel's songs, gets the Film Fiesta treatment, meaning you can booze it up at Bowers' Tangata happy hour/wine tasting while partaking in a Q&A sesh with director Teresa Suarez and actor Carlos Yorvick. The official after-party takes place across the street at the classy banquet hall the Green Parrot.

BOLIVIAN CLASSICS
There's a heavy emphasis on Bolivian cinema this year, featuring some real humdingers from art-house director Jorge Sanjinés, including 1966's Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor), a low budget, guerrilla-style story depicting the country's own anger toward foreign-aid groups conducting illegal sterilizations on Quechua women. In this fictionalized drama, indigenous people fight back against their faux-Peace Corps aggressors for the damage done to their community. Sanjinés' Ukamau (And So It Is) follows a vengeful widower hunting down the man who raped and murdered his young wife. And in La Nación Clandestina, Sanjinés' most lauded work, a coffin maker treks across the country to his rural hometown to pay penance for the war crimes he committed years earlier.

HOLLYWOOD GIANTS
OC Film Fiesta presents a 60th-anniversary screening of the George Stevens classic Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean and Dennis Hopper. This story about feuding Texas ranchhands—which treads through themes of power, greed and racism—secured a second Best Actor nomination for Dean, who perished in a car accident before the film's release. Patrons are encouraged to participate in a 1950s costume contest and check out live music, a classic-car show and a reading from the 1952 Edna Ferber novel on which the film is based. Preceding the film is a screening of the PBS-produced documentary Children of Giant, which chronicles the memories and experiences of the residents of Marfa, the setting of Giant and location for the film's shoot.

AND MORE!
Other notable documentaries in the fiesta include No Más Bebés, the eye-opening documentary on the ongoing practice of doctors sterilizing Mexican immigrant women without their consent; a student-produced entry on the Cypress Street Mural Restoration project, a massive artistic undertaking by artist Emigdio “Higgy” Vasquez to restore the mural in Orange originally painted by his father, famed Chicano painter Emigdio Vasquez; and Mele Murals, a Tadashi Nakamura-directed documentary on how graffiti and street art helped troubled and lost Hawaiian youths reclaim their lives and shape their futures.

For screening locations, show times, ticket prices and other information, visit www.masamedia.org/ocfilmfiesta2016.

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