“In this Day of the Dead celebration, people mock death and gender and whatever else
needs a little push.” — La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead

A remarkably resilient 1988 hour-long documentary of the Days of the Dead celebrations ranging from small Mexican village Indian temples to San Francisco’s Mission District will be screened in a free, public program Monday, Nov. 3, at 7 p.m. in the City Library auditorium.

La Ofrenda: The Days of The Dead, directed and produced by Lourdes Portillo, is part of the SLC Film Center’s Spanish Language Film Series. Following the screening, dancers from Jackson Elementary School’s Adelante Program will perform. The film is in Spanish with English subtitles.

Ofrenda is the Spanish word for offering and the celebrations follow Halloween on Nov. 1 and Nov. 2, which mark All Saints Day and All Souls Day on the Christian calendar. The first seven segments of this well-paced film are situated in Mexico. For example, a family in Oaxaca clean the cemetery plots, arrange orange cempazuchitl (marigold) flowers on the grave, prepare a special family meal, pray at the home altar created in memory of the departed grandfather, and then gather with others in the community for the night vigil in the candlelit cemetery. Another portion traces the calavera (skeleton) as a cultural icon, from Jose Guadalupe Posada’s engravings to Diego Rivera’s great murals and the contemporary papier maché calaveras of folk artists such as the Linares family in Mexico City. Yet another segment features the “baile de Oaxaca,” a street celebration with a mock funeral in which men play women’s roles.

The film then switches to San Francisco for the final four segments featuring gallery exhibitions and the traditional evening parade in the Mission District as well as personal descriptions of three altars. The film closes with a classroom of children who discuss with their teacher what they would wish for a classmate whose mother has died or for themselves before they die.

Indeed the film covers a great deal of ground in just 56 minutes. “Yet the pace of the narrative also underscores the distance between the Mexican and Chicano cultures,” says Kathleen Newman of the University of Iowa. “The slower pace of the first part with its calm appreciation of ritual and of a more rural life culminates the urban, slightly more frenetic celebrations in the briefer second part.”

She adds, “By stressing that the celebrations in Mexico are an extension of indigenous cultural practices, the film also necessarily suggests the ways in which the Mission celebrations are distinct: they are an act of will that is a conscious, political effort to continue Amerindian and Mexican traditions.”

For more information, see here.