• From Mestizo

Last year the African Diaspora Film Festival presented two important rediscoveries, Lionel Rogosin’s quasi-documentary Come Back, Africa (1959) and the Dutch-Surinamese coproduction One People (1976). This year the major rediscovery of the fest is the Venezuelan feature Mestizo, which screens tomorrow at Facets at 6:30 PM. The movie was made in 1988, but it feels like a lost film of the 1960s. Director Mario Handler employs a playful, exploratory style to consider complex political ideas, a strategy reminiscent of the late-60s films of Jean-Luc Godard (La Chinoise) and Glauber Rocha (Terra em Transe); as in near-contemporaneous films by Dusan Makavejev (W.R. Mysteries of the Organism) or Nagisa Oshima (Sing a Song of Sex), he employs frank sexual content to political effect, presenting sexual relationships to characterize power dynamics in society at large.