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Reviews
Cortile Cascino (1962)
Documentary about a Sicilian slum
Director Michael Roemer made this documentary about a slum in Palermo, Sicily, for NBC in 1961. NBC never aired it. I saw it years later in a film class at which Roemer showed up and talked about it.
The houses had no running water. They fetched water from one outside spigot. They shat on a railroad track that ran through the center of the slum and occasionally someone would get killed when a train came through. The men got occasional work from the Mafia. The women struggled to raise their children.
The stories of the slum-dwellers are raw and well-told.
It was also titled 'Inferno'.
Robert M. Young returned 30 years later to follow up on some of the people in the documentary 'Children of Fate'.
Amores difíciles: Milagro en Roma (1988)
A modest masterpiece that balances the sweet and the bitter
I don't like numbers: movies have too many aspects to condense to a scalar.
I saw this movie on PBS one evening when I expected nothing of it, a movie from Colombia about a poor man who tries to get the Church to canonize his dead daughter. I never heard of the actors or the director nor seen them before or since. They adeptly finessed the temptations to maudlin sentimentality and a diatribe against the Church or bureaucracy in general. I found the representation of the Church farcical, not diabolical: they're just human too. How would I react to a modest rural man with a corpse still fresh after twelve years? It is a marvelous modest masterpiece that has my favorite virtue of not trying to be grander than the story deserves.
I strongly recommend the source story, 'The Saint', collected in 'Strange Pilgrims' by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. I just read it, which inspired me to look the movie up on IMDb. It casts a whole new twist on the story.