The Children of Sanchez

A wealthy woman, vacationing in Acapulco with her stuffy husband, stumbles upon evidence that she is being stalked by an international jewel thief and murderer.

A stranded ship. A man and two boys go to its rescue - uncle Arturo and his two nephews. The ship is empty, except for a little girl - the only survivor.

In Mexico, a mad general is leading his own war against the Church. Priests are rounded up, churches burned down and religion outlawed. The suffering of one pious catholic priest could bring the tide of change however.

After his mother's death, a young man edits the family's home videos to bring back her image. As he delves into the occult he begins to reveal the paradoxical magic of memories and cinema.

Camelia, a prostitute who works in a low-class cabaret in Mexico City (called "The Blood Stain') meets Guillermo, a young man from the country who just arrived in the city looking for a better life. She offers to take care of him until he gets set up, and the initial friendship soon turns romantic. This inevitably causes problems with Gastón, Camelia's pimp.

A boxer confronts his past before an important fight.

The Alchemist assembles together a group of people from all walks of life to represent the planets in the solar system. The occult adept's intention is to put his recruits through strange mystical rites and divest them of their worldly baggage before embarking on a trip to Lotus Island. There they ascend the Holy Mountain to displace the immortal gods who secretly rule the universe.

A trio of unemployed silent film actors are mistaken for real heroes by a small Mexican village in search of someone to stop a malevolent bandit.

A weekend cruise on a luxurious party yacht goes horribly wrong for a group of old high-school friends when they get stuck in the water many miles from shore and a happy reunion turns into a fight for survival.

When brash Texas border officer Mike Norton wrongfully kills and buries the friend and ranch hand of Pete Perkins, the latter is reminded of a promise he made to bury his friend, Melquiades Estrada, in his Mexican home town. He kidnaps Norton and exhumes Estrada's corpse, and the odd caravan sets out on horseback for Mexico.

Around the film hang fascinating questions about border politics, which I’ll touch on in an introduction before the screening. One of Eugene Buck’s motivations for making the film may have been his rough cross-examination during his kidnappers’ first trials, in October 1913, when defense attorneys cast him as a confused and unreliable witness against idealistic freedom fighters. On film he could reproduce the pursuit, the shootouts, his kidnapping, and his friend’s murder just as he had testified. Reenacting the crime on film may have been the best revenge—and a way to honor the sacrifice of Deputy Ortiz, a twenty-year police veteran and, for the era, a rare Mexican American lawman.