In a career spanning five decades, film-maker Mike Dibb has returned constantly to Latin America. Join him as he introduces his documentaries on Cuban music, writer Octavio Paz, Mexican popular culture and the ‘new world’, alongside emerging Colombian documentarist Laura Alhach.
11.00 Dreams of a New World (1988/9, 60 mins)
A fascinating, intricately organised tissue of ideas and images that explores the myths and metaphors that informed European perception of the ‘new’ continent and later its perception of itself.
12.15 Octavio Paz (1988/9, 50 mins)
The great Mexcian poet and essayist talks in English about his life, and reads in Spanish, a selection of his own work.
13.15 City Limits (with Rossana Horsley, 1988/9, 60 mins)
A film that makes us aware of the crusted, jewel-bright variety of Latin America.
14.30 What's Cuba Playing At? (1985, 75 mins)
A joyous romp through the origins of Cuban music… Rumbas, cha- cha- chas, jazz and heart-rending folk ballads.
16.15 Laura Alhach: Colombia Now
Remembering the Taste of Avocados (2017, 21 mins)
Remembering the Taste of Avocados recalls the memory of the displacement of the
Macayepans in Colombia and the reconstruction of their homes after. The story is told through
the eyes of the village as witnesses of violence, and the harvest of the avocados that helped
reconcile them.
Chontaduro Honey (2017, 7 mins)
Chontaduro Honey seeks to understand the complexity of Cali through archive photographs. It
portrays, through myths and Salsa, the relationship of a women with the city, an introspection on
memory, and what it means to feel at home.
Mike Dibb is an award-winning English documentary filmmaker. In almost half a century of making films mainly for television – on subjects including cinema, literature, art, jazz, sport and popular culture – "he has defined and re-defined not only the televisual art documentary genre but has been able to make moving image pieces as a form of self portraiture".[2] Dibb has made many acclaimed films, including on Federico García Lorca, C. L. R. James, Astor Piazzolla, Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, Barbara Thompson and other notable subjects. In the words of Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian: "In a career spanning almost five decades, it's possible Dibb has shaped more ideas and offered more ways of seeing than any other TV documentarian of his generation.
Laura Alhach has studied Anthropology and Ethnographic and Documentary Film in both Colombia and the UK. She is interested in exploring, from a personal and political approach, the materiality of memory conveyed through images.