Skip to main content

Border Brujo

Isaac Artenstein

1990 00:52:00 United StatesEnglish, SpanishColorMono4:3
Tags:
Latino/Chicano, Performance

Description

Sitting at an altar decorated with a kitsch collection of cultural fetish items, and wearing a border patrolman’s jacket decorated with buttons, bananas, beads, and shells, Gómez-Peña delivers a sly and bitter indictment of U.S. colonial attitudes toward Mexican culture and history. Whirling through various Mexican American stereotypes, pulling on costumes as easily as accents, Gómez-Peña emphasizes the collision of Mexican and American cultures, their mixture and misunderstanding of each other, each appearing as a dream/nightmare reflection of the “Other.” In turns powerful and playful, Border Brujo poignantly illustrates the double edge of forced cultural occupation.

Director: Isaac Artenstein

This title is also available on Border Art Clásicos (1990-2005): An Anthology of Collaborative Video Works by Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

About Isaac Artenstein

Isaac Artenstein studied painting and photography at UCLA and film and video production at Cal Arts. He wrote and directed the feature film Break of Dawn (1990), a biography of Pedro J. Gonzalez, a pioneer of Los Angeles’ Spanish-language radio in the 1930s, which premiered at Sundance and was later shown on Telemundo and the BBC. He produced the romantic comedy Love Always (1996) which aired on the Lifetime Channel, the thriller Bloody Proof (2000) for Univision, and the social satire A Day Without A Mexican (2004). Artenstein has also directed and/or produced a number of award-winning documentaries, including Diana Kennedy: Cuisines of Mexico (1981) and Ballad of an Unsung Hero (1983), as well as In the Name of the People (1985), narrated by Martin Sheen.

He has taught film production and directing at the University of Southern California and the University of California at San Diego, and was a founding member of the Border Arts Workshop in San Diego. Currently, Artenstein is developing a feature film based on his 1991 play Under a Brilliant Sky, about the photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. His documentary Tijuana Jews had its premiere at the San Diego Jewish Film Festival in February 2005.