courtesy MCA
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When Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art took over the Holiday Theater last year, its intention was always to use the venue for some of its most exciting programming – the kind of stuff that breaks away from the traditional “wall-based” museum format. That includes musical performances such as the upcoming Chief Adjuah show on August 30, as well as the offbeat lecture series Mixed Taste, which combines disparate topics such as “Ice Core Sampling” and “Guatemalan Coffee.”
But for movie lovers, the Holiday’s Tuesday-night Spanish-language series Cinema Azteca is the crème de la crème or, more properly, lo mejor de lo mejor.
“We wanted to honor the legacy of the theater as a Spanish-language movie theater – as Denver’s first Spanish-language movie theater,” says Sarah Kate Baie, MCA’s director of programming.
The theater debuted in 1926 as the Egyptian, but changed to the Holiday in the ’50s. It was around that time that it started showing Spanish-language cinema, serving the growing Mexican community of the Northside. That lasted until the 1980s, when economic pressure killed the location as a movie theater. Hosting a series of tenants over the ensuing decades, the building remained relatively intact, down to the vintage decor. Eventually, it caught the attention of the MCA-affiliated Denver Cultural Property Trust, which saves local landmarks and spearheaded the purchase and leasing deal with the museum.
“In a neighborhood that’s rapidly gentrifying, we have this asset of this beautiful theater that’s preserved and we’ve updated and that we can give back to folks,” Baie says. “So [we thought], ‘On Tuesday nights we’ll have this film series and we’ll work with different curatorial partners for each series of films.'”
Arranged in a loose quarterly schedule, the rotating cast of curators allows the museum to highlight a vast sweep of Spanish-language film, from the Mexican Golden Age to a diverse selection of contemporary filmmakers throughout the Americas.
The result is a celebration of great films that hold special significance for Denver’s artistic and Latin communities, all of which are rarely seen, if not impossible to find.
The inaugural series, “Out of This World,” which began in March, was assembled by Eduardo Sarabia, an MCA boardmember and Guadalajara-based artist. He selected three months of classic and contemporary surrealist films – an artistic movement closely tied to early Mexican cinema – working with art critic and curator Lorena Peña Brito. As a starting point, they used pioneering cinema giant Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished travelogue on Mexico, ¡Que Viva México!, followed by films from Arturo Ripstein, María Novaro, Gerando Naranjo and Luis Buñuel.
The current series, “From the Americas,” was designed to be “interested in telling a story about the spectrum of Latin American cinema, and most of that…from a contemporary perspective,” Baie explains. The films were curated by the Biennial of the Americas, the Denver-based community and leadership-building nonprofit association that also organized the first Cities Summit of the Americas. If the initial collection of films focused on a very specific and foundational aspect of Latin film, “From the Americas” demonstrates the full, rich scope of what Cinema Azteca can celebrate.
Case in point: The collection came out of the gate with 2011’s Juan of the Dead from Cuba, a horror-comedy romp that fires both barrels into a story evenly split between zombie outbreak and political satire, in which the state-controlled media on the radio describes the rampaging undead as “dissidents.” The rest of the series’ entries stray from out-and-out horror, but they share with Juan intensely idiosyncratic, character-focused narratives, from Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s career-launching crossover hit, Amores Perros, to the gender-role-challenging Pelo Malo from Mariana Rondón.
With titles from Cuba, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, Uruguay and Nicaragua, it might be the most diverse contemporary Latin series ever to hit Denver. And although it is drawing to a close, two more can’t-miss films remain.
The first, 2001’s 25 watts, playing Tuesday, August 22, follows 24 hours in the lives of three aimless friends in Montevideo, Uruguay. Shot in black and white, it recalls both the ennui of the French New Wave and the quirky ’90s slackerdom of Kevin Smith’s Clerks, while fully inhabiting its own unique characters and cultural context. The final film in the cycle, the Managua-set La Yuma, screening August 29, is the story of a young woman who dreams of becoming a boxer, setting in motion a tale that may pummel viewers’ emotions as much as its protagonist’s gloves. After that, the series will take a short break before returning with what promises to be another worthy installment: a group chosen by multi-disciplinary artist Ana Segovia to tie into her work at Cowboy, the MCA’s major upcoming fall exhibit.
Film (and art) fans should keep their eyes peeled for the format-blending show, which opens September 29. It will feature Segovia and the MCA “moving away from the mythology of the Marlboro man cowboy, who’s a white guy in a Stetson,” says Baie, “in telling what we hope to be a more complete picture of the American West.”
Cinema Azteca, every Tuesday at 7 p.m., MCA Denver at the Holiday Theater, 2644 West 32nd Avenue.
Tickets are $5-$15, available at mcadenver.org. Films are presented in Spanish with English subtitles.