100 Ways to Cross the Border – 2023
Showtimes:
Tuesday, April 11, 5:15 PM
Sunday, April 16, 1:15 PM
100 Ways to Cross the Border
Director: Amber Bay Bemak, Documentary, Mexico, USA, 84 min
An innovative look at performance art as it relates to geography, borders, and the body. The film is created as a performance itself, often blending the lines between protagonist and director as well as what is scripted and what is improvised on screen. It follows a non-linear history of acclaimed artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s work and life, which moves from working individually to working collectively when he forms his performance troupe La Pocha Nostra, an international multi-identified community of artists, in 1993. Throughout the film, we meet characters who are part of La Pocha Nostra’s world: the Aging Ballerina, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, La Fulminante, Princess Vuvu, La Saula, the Border-Crossing Mariachis, and the Naked Director. These characters- artists, sex-workers, activists, and eco-sexuals, engage with performance as exorcism, as ritual, as collective healing, and as a way to go into trance.