UCLA International Institute

At Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni (Salt Lake), where many families work with salt, a 13-year-old boy named Kunturi lives a traditional Quechua life with his family. His life begins to change when his father takes him on his first trip with the llama caravan. For three months he travels the Ruta de la Sal, exchanging blocks o...f salt his father and other villagers have chipped from the lake, for other needed goods. He learns from experiences he encounters along the way, including meeting Ulala, the most beautiful girl he could ever imagine. They feel the stirrings of first love as they share the same dream: to run together across the immense white sea that is the Salar de Uyuni, until they reach the end of the horizon.

Tickets are $10.

The film is in Quechua with English subtitles.
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Director Lucrecia Martel's astonishing debut feature La ciénaga (2001) plunges the audience into the decadence and dissolution of two intertwined middle-class families in Argentina with little if any narrative cues to sort the villains from the victims amid the existential morass in which her tangle of characters find ...themselves.

In la niña santa (2004), Martel explores the budding sexual and religious consciousness of the 14-year-old Amalia who becomes obsessed with a middle-aged doctor after he illicitly rubs up against her in the street—only to have him later turn up as a guest at her lonely mother's hotel.

The Billy Wilder Theater Box Office opens one hour before showtime and tickets can be purchased for $9. $8 for Students, seniors, Cineclub members, UCLA Alumni Association members (ID required).
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2501 Migrants: A Journey is a full-length documentary that explores questions of art, the artist, and indigenous community in the context of global migration. Daily, thousands of primarily poor and young indigenous Mexicans abandon their native homes and begin voyages to the “first world.” In their wake, they leave beh...ind the hollow footprints of a cultural and domestic abandonment. 2501 Migrants illustrates this through the story of Alejandro Santiago. Upon returning to his native Teococuilco, he is struck by what he perceives as a virtual “ghost town.” Alejandro experiences, first hand, the reality that Oaxaca has emerged as one of Mexico’s leading “exporters of human labor” to the United States. Inspired by this, he decides to create a monumental installation art piece: 2,501 life-size sculptures.

There will be a panel discussion with the director following the film.

The film is in Spanish with English subtitles. Tickets will be also available at the Box Office one hour before showtime.Read More

The well-ordered, affluent life of Verónica, a dentist in rural Argentina, begins to unravel after she has a mysterious car accident on a remote road at night. Unable to identify what she hit but imagining the worst, Verónica suffers a breakdown that finds her drifting mutely along the streets of her hometown in an alm...ost hallucinatory daze. Through Verónica's wanderings, director Lucrecia Martel constructs a spellbinding study of doubt and guilt within a damning parable about social class in contemporary Argentina.

This feature will be preceded by REY MUERTO, a striking 1995 short film about poverty, domestic violence and vengeance seethe in the crumbling homes and dusty streets of a northern Argentine town.

The Billy Wilder Theater Box Office opens one hour before showtime and tickets can be purchased for $9. $8 for Students, seniors, Cineclub members, UCLA Alumni Association members (ID required).
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Everyone is graduating soon and they’re about to live a year they’ll never forget. It may be their last year of high school, but it’s the beginning of everything else. Those memories that we never forget: our best friends, greatest loves, incredible discoveries and challenges and the imminent end of our youth. This sto...ry takes place in Rio de Janeiro in 1981, the year before the boom of Rock-Brazil, painting an exciting and emotional picture of a pioneer generation, out to renew the customs and values of their country.Read More

Melnitz Movies, in co-sponsorship with the Asia Institute, presents TREELESS MOUNTAIN, the acclaimed new film from director So Yong Kim. When their mother needs to leave in order to find their estranged father, seven year-old Jin and her younger sister Bin are left to live with their aunt for the summer. With only a sm...all piggy bank and their mother’s promise to return when it is full, the two young girls are forced to acclimate to changes in their family life. Counting the days, and the coins, the two bright-eyed girls eagerly anticipate their mother’s homecoming. But when the bank fills up, and with their mother still not back, the girls’ aunt decides that she can no longer tend to the children. Taken to live on their grandparents’ farm, it is here that Jin comes to learn the importance of family bonds in this beautiful, meditative, and though-provoking film. Read More

How do we explain the disjuncture between China's reaction to the liberal human rights norm and its response to the international rule-of-law norm? And, how does one explain the reverse directions of China's adaptation to differing international norms? I present a constructivist analysis of China's adaptation to intern...ational norms--a less likely case. I argue that the state adapts to differing norms through varying pathways and by varying mechanisms. I propose that the rule-based constructivism better explains the the degree of the Chinese government's adaptation to international human rights pressure. That is, China adapted to human rights pressure through defiant argumentation at international occasions, which made China increasingly embedded into the international human rights regime. On the other hand, I propose that the interpretive and endogenous constructivisms, when integrated, better explains China's adaptation to international norm of rule of law. That is, China adapted to the rule-of-law norm through purposive learning and bureaucratic matching.Read More

Over the years, every aspect of the 5th century Ajanta Caves from door hinges to garland hooks has undergone careful scrutiny by scholars eager to uncover the historical circumstances surrounding the creation and use of this spectacular monastic complex. But despite the fascinating information and compelling questions... this research has uncovered, there are still some very basic aspects of the caves’ history and use that continue to elude us. One of these questions centers on the role that popular or folk deities played at this Buddhist site. This presentation will explore the way in which the builders of the Ajanta caves situated images of these demigods and examine how their presence seems to have impacted some of the choices that were made in regard to decoration. Ultimately the analysis will suggest that the narrative and decorative program in the caves, may have also been intended for a rather unusual audience. Specifically, I am referring to the Nàga King (Nàgendra) which the Cave 16 inscription informs us was a resident of this mountainside even prior to the creation of the Buddhist monastery. The visual motifs employed at Ajaåæà reveal an intense interest in supernatural beings and provide some insight into the complex relationship between the monastery and the local gods. Others have already written on the economic benefits of this interaction, I, however, am more concerned with what this implied supernatural audience can reveal about issues of legitimacy and the manner in which artistic representations were understood to function in social and religious contexts.Read More

A young girl named Zimbabwe (so named by her patriotic father) finds that life gets even tougher in rural Zimbabwe after the death of her mother from the dreaded “thin disease” - AIDS. Her father has also perished from the disease, as has her elder sister, making her responsible for her younger brother and her niece, h...er sister’s baby daughter.

The village Headman tells her they must leave, that the village can no longer support them. A jar buried by her mother before her death contains some money (now rendered useless over years of hyperinflation) and an address of an aunt in the Zimbabwean border town of Beitbridge.

The three children walk for days until they get there, only to get an icy reception from the aunt. Though she reluctantly agrees to let them stay, they are treated like slaves. Zimbabwe is all but pushed by her extended family to jump the border into South Africa to find work to support them all.

In South Africa without any papers, she finds herself trapped in an illegal employment racket, where her pay is almost totally stolen, and she’s constantly raped at the house where she works. Threats of being reported to the police render her powerless against her abuse and exploitation.

Eventually she takes matters into her own hands and has to turn herself into the police - knowing she’ll be deported - rather than face a worse outcome.

Her home-coming is bittersweet: her Aunt’s guilt and worry creates an emotional and warm welcome but Zimbabwe learns that her brother, Dumi, has just left to attempt a crossing of the Limpopo River in search of her… the cycle of tragedy continues.

This film is a part of the International Human Rights Film Series.Read More

Melnitz Movies, in co-sponsorship with the Latin American Institute, presents the latest documentary from acclaimed filmmaker Heddy Honigmann. In OBLIVION, Honigmann focuses on Peru’s capital city of Lima, revealing its startling contrasts of wealth and poverty. The film provides moving portraits of street musicians, v...endors, shoeshine boys, and the gymnasts and jugglers who perform at traffic stops. The film also visits with small business owners and contrasts the work and home environments of bartenders, waiters and waitresses employed at Lima’s finest restaurants and hotels, but who live in the city’s surrounding slums. Marked by Honigmann’s sensitivity and warm approach, OBLIVION introduces us to the everyday reality of Lima, celebrating a people, who, albeit politically powerless, have resisted being consigned to oblivion.
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