La cuesta: Worlding a Sidewalk
A film by Alvaro Torres, Daniel Perera
Costa Rica/Guatemala/USA, Experimental Documentary, 2013
15 min, HD, Color/Black & White
Spanish, English with English subtitles
Director Alvaro Torres in attendance
This film was screened as a part of the 2014 Cine Las Americas International Film Festival (CLAIFF17)
This short film preceded the screening of the feature Chateles del campo (Country Kids)
The places we notice in passing are sites where social hierarchies manifest themselves and interact. In the realm of the visible, only some people are able to remain unseen, to choose whom to see and when. Aesthetics are not how the world is presented to us but rather how it is pre-established for us — what Jacques Ranciere calls “the distribution of the sensible.” What would emerge if we explored an ordinary stretch of sidewalk in the East Side of Austin, Texas, for a period of several months? How and by whom would we be challenged aesthetically and politically? LA CUESTA evokes a place on the side of the road and the lives that sustain it. This interactive documentary is a sensuous ethnography, a confrontation, and a poem.
World Premiere
Print Source: Alvaro Torres Crespo, atorrescrespo@gmail.com