“We've seen the whole face of America change,” says Los Lobos drummer Louis Perez in Chicano Rock! The Sounds of East Los Angeles, “and that face is brown.” Chicano Rock!, a new documentary scheduled to air this Sunday on PBS, examines this demographic shift through a cultural lens, exploring the musical fruits of the twentieth-century influx of Mexican immigrants to the United States. A recent article in the Indianapolis weekly Nuvo previews the film and talks to its creator, Jon Wilkman.

In the documentary, Wilkman traces the lineages of several groups of Chicano musicians. He looks at performers like Lalo Guerrero, who channeled traditional Mexican sounds, as well as bands like Cannibal and the Headhunters, who drew more heavily from U.S. rock influences. Wilkman seems most interested in a third group that bridged the first two; for him, they tell a story that’s bigger than the music they made, helping us see the cultural give and take that occurs as immigrant groups settle into new lives in the United States.

“We are, like Chicano musicians, beginning to blend cultures, just like they blended musical sounds," Wilkman says. "It's not only a story about the past; it's suggesting what our future is going to be—not only musically but culturally.”

Image courtesy of Riza Nugraha, licensed under Creative Commons. 

(Thanks, AltWeeklies.)

Christian leaders in Korea are up-in-arms over a new television documentary depicting Jesus as a good person, a political leader, but not as God. The Korean Times reports that the TV show called “Shineui Gil, Inganeui Gil” (The Road of God, the Road of Man), “was intended to seek harmony among religions involving Jehovah, God, and Jesus.” Christian leaders, however, have tried to stop the program from airing, claiming the directors are “trying to tarnish the honor of Jesus.”

Considering the offence they took over the TV show, Korean Christian leaders should probably stay away from the Wittenberg Door’s recent list of 10 of the worst movies about Jesus ever made. Writer Danny Gallagher selected a number of standouts from Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter (seen below) to Jesus, the Miniseries. A few of these films walk that fine line between satire and a truly horrible movie. The list also includes the Tom Hanks bomb, The DaVinci Code, but mystifyingly neglects The Passion of the Christ.

Iranian documentaries are startlingly candid, coming from "an essentially totalitarian society," writes the documentary film magazine Point of View (article not available online). The trade-off: not all Iranian films at international festivals come with official approval, nor are they all allowed to be screened in Iran. 

That tension doesn’t mean Iran’s government doesn’t applaud its filmmakers. On the contrary—At the opening of Tehran’s Cinema Verité documentary festival last October, reports Point of View, Iran’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance praised documentary filmmaking as “a method of uprising against a world in which the truth is denied.” He also called it “a readily understood language which can be used in the struggle against evil.” 

The Iranian documentaries discussed are more modest and less cryptic than the minister’s statement, not to mention more revealing about Iranian society than the cultural minister might like. They give less-than-lofty glimpses into “individual experience” like incarcerated youth dealing with the effects of drug abuse (It’s Always Late for Freedom) and Iranian male-to-female transsexuals (the Sundance-screened Be Like Others). The films reminders viewers of Iranian citizens’ humanity and individuality, writes Point of View, “at a time when our everyday knowledge of Iran is predicated on cultural generalizations.”

 Image by Hamed Saber, licensed under Creative Commons.