Le Rendez-vous des quais (Rendez-vous of the Docks). 1955. France. Directed by Paul Carpita. Screenplay by Carpita, André Maufray. With Maufray, Jeanine Moretti, Roger Manunta. North American premiere. Courtesy Anaïs Carpita. In French; English subtitles. 75 min.
Digital restoration by the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC) and the Cinémathèque française, in collaboration with the heirs of Paul Carpita and Ciné-Archives.
Después del terremoto (After the Earthquake). 1979. USA. Written and directed by Lourdes Portillo, Nina Serrano. With Vilma Coronado, Agnelo Guzman, Mário Lara. New York premiere. Courtesy Women Make Movies. In English, Spanish; English subtitles. 24 min.
Digital restoration by University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in collaboration with Corpus Fluxus, with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Banned in France for three decades, Paul Carpita’s 1955 feature Rendez-vous of the Docks emerges both as a vital document of postwar French social consciousness and a precious record of working-class life in midcentury Marseille. Self-described as “a schoolteacher who knew how to use a camera,” Carpita brought both artistic ambition and documentary rigor to this politically charged narrative, in which a young couple searches for a home against the background of Marseille’s dock workers’ strikes of the early 1950s. The film captures a critical moment when workers, discovering they were loading munitions by day while secretly unloading soldiers’ coffins by night, went on strike in protest of France’s Indochina War.
A groundbreaking early work from acclaimed Chicana filmmaker Lourdes Portillo, After the Earthquake emerged during the 1970 renaissance of political cinema, and represents a significant intersection of feminist filmmaking and Latin American diasporic narratives. Shot in grainy black and white, this dramatic short follows a young Nicaraguan woman who has immigrated to San Francisco in the wake of the 1972 Managua earthquake, enduring both personal and political aftershocks as she navigates her new reality.