Interview. Mark Becker.

"I liked the idea that I could let the political subtext simmer beneath the surface and allow the audience to consider the larger resonance of one person's plight," Mark Becker tells Sara Schieron at the main site. They're talking about Romántico, a Sundance veteran, Silverdocs award-winner and placer on many a year-end best-of list in 2005 and 2006 that's screening in San Francisco, Denver and Seattle before opening in Chicago next week.

"Most similarly themed docs before and since Romántico have had a ripped-from-the-headlines feel, tackling specific issues with activist zeal," writes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "Several (Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary and Un Franco, 14 Pesetas among them) have been very good. But despite the concern they share, they're like well-crafted news bulletins, while at core Romántico seems like something else entirely - soulful and poetic, its tone and narrative oddly reminiscent of 40s Italian neorealist classics."

"At a time when anti-immigrant demagoguery is again on the rise, Romántico's close and unsentimental encounter with the life of an undocumented migrant and his family - skillfully rendered in an intimate verité style - locates the real engine of social upheaval in the underlying poverty and insecurity of a transnational economy," writes Robert Avila at SF360. "But even more, it manages to capture the poetry, born of suffering and resilience, in the humblest of voices."

Posted by dwhudson at January 19, 2007 3:17 PM