Latin-American Studies

Tells the remarkable story of Peru's Villa El Salvador, one of Latin America's best organized squatter settlements, with 300,000 inhabitants, dozens of schools, markets and recreation areas. Interviews with residents are combined with scenes of daily life in the community.

Examines the plight of Guatemalan Indian peasants victimized by the government's counterinsurgency program which has led many Guatemalans to go into exile or to become internal refugees inside the country.

Over half of the Latin American labor force works in the "informal economy," creating their own forms of income and employment through hard work and ingenuity. This documentary celebrates the resourcefulness of impoverished people throughout the developing world for whom economic necessity is truly the mother of invention.

This documentary chronicles one week in the life of street kids living in Cusco, Peru. Working in collaboration with a shelter for some of Cusco's 3,000 street kids, the filmmakers enlist several of the youngsters to form a street theatre company.

A Yekuana Indian chief in the Amazon, a leader in the struggle for indigenous rights, speaks out forcefully about the disrespectful attitude shown towards his people by colonizers and missionaries.

Examines the popular movement for land reform in Brazil. The film shows massive demonstrations, marches and protests throughout Brazil, including the establishment of a large camp of some 1500 landless peasants at an unused private farm in Rio Grande do Sul.

This film autobiography of a Bolivian miner also chronicles the rise and fall of the mining industry and the political history of Bolivia.

Portrays the courageous efforts of Argentine mothers and grandmothers to locate their children and grandchildren who were among the innocent victims of the military junta's "dirty war" against the opposition in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Examines the controversial issue of Latin America's `external debt' to the U.S., focusing on the ways it affects children, including malnourishment, lack of medical care,

This prize-winning documentary examines both the causes and consequences of the brutal war of extermination Brazilian society is waging against its own children.

An emotionally powerful account of Pope John Paul's 1987 visit to Chile, which caused a massive outpouring of political discontent with the Pinochet regime, including emotional appeals to the Pope to support protests over the imprisonment and torture of political prisoners, the lack of political freedom, and widespread hunger and unemployment.

Takes viewers into the heart of the Brazilian favelas, the slums that spread uncontrollably through Sao Paulo, Brazil's wealthiest industrial center. The social reality of this cruel habitat is examined by those who dwell there and by artists, philosophers, educators and sociologists.