THE DUMB GIRL OF PORTICI
dirs. Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber, 1916
United States, 115 min.
Silent with English intertitles.

SATURDAY, MAY 10 – 7:30 PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY! LIVE SCORE BY JAKE PEPPER AND ZACH KOEBER

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Spectacle is proud to present one of American cinema’s first true epics, with a new original score performed by esteemed local musicians Jake Pepper and Zach Koeber. 

With a production budget of $250K and based on the 1828 French opera La muette de Portici, THE DUMB GIRL OF PORTICI was Universal’s first blockbuster gamble, showcasing ballerina Anna Pavlova’s elegant dancing against the backdrop of a tragedy of star-crossed lovers. Pavlova plays Finella, our titular “dumb girl,” whose hopelessly romantic personality attracts a powerful Spanish duke (Wadsworth Harris). However, this affair complicates Finella’s relationship with her brother Masaniello (renowned silent filmmaker Rupert Julian), a determined fisherman slowly rallying the people toward revolution. 

Elevating melodrama to violent heights, THE DUMB GIRL OF PORTICI is one of the earliest examples of movie magic, with biblical images of public chaos and heavenly, spellbinding dance footage from Pavlova and company. The film originally screened with orchestral accompaniment; while we don’t necessarily have the space for a full symphonic group, we are pleased to work with two of the DIY music scene’s finest, Jake Pepper and Zach Koeber. Appearing for the first time at Spectacle, they’ll provide a music accompaniment to match the picture’s majestic presentation. 

…a crucial rediscovery—as are the art of Weber over all and, for that matter, the celebration of Pavlova’s single screen performance … Along with the specifics of their genius, “The Dumb Girl of Portici” is a welcome reminder that the history of cinema still belongs to the future.

—Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Jake Pepper and Zach Koeber make up half of Ace Bandage, the jam-heavy rock band based in Brooklyn. Their fondness of improvisation and vast knowledge of timbral music allows them to shift seamlessly through varied sonic palettes. Pepper also performed in Brooklyn synth punk outfit Future Punx, while Koeber got his start in the local scene as one-third of Archie Pelago, and he currently collaborates with deep house producer Max in the World. Both Jake and Zach have also guest DJ’d on the prestigious independent station The Lot Radio.

Special thanks to George Schmalz and Kino Lorber.

WINDOW ON YOUR PRESENT
dir. Cinqué Lee, 1988
60 mins. United States.
In English.

FRIDAY, MAY 2 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 10 – 5 PM followed by Q+A with Cinque Lee (ONE NIGHT ONLY!)
TUESDAY, MAY 13 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MAY 26 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 31 – 7:30 PM

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SPECIAL EVENT (Q&A) TICKETS

15 years after being released on DVD (and almost 40 years after it was shot), artist Cinqué Lee’s WINDOW ON YOUR PRESENT returns to the flaming S – this time, with Cinqué Lee in person for Q+A.

Collaborating with Jim Jarmusch on his directorial debut, Lee – who appeared in Jarmusch’s MYSTERY TRAIN and served as both cowriter and coproducer on his brother Spike’s CROOKLYN – gives us an unsettling dreamscape taking place in the rubble and ruins of a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn neighborhood.

WINDOW ON YOUR PRESENT creates a morbid and lonely atmosphere seen through the eyes of two protagonists, Europa and Lever. Surrounded around a colorless existence, the dialogue-free film shows us horrors of neglect, abuse, and dangerous lonesome through the eyes of this young couple while they search for something special outside of their dreary world.

Filmed on the cusp of the No Wave movement specific to New York filmmakers expanding outside of a small screening room on St. Marks Place, Lee leans into gritty and guerilla style filmmaking that movement is really known for. Between the visuals from cinematographer Leslie Mentel (SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT), the voiceover by Maria Pieneres, and the incredible jazz score by Spike and Cinqué’s father Bill Lee, this collaboration of artists makes WINDOW ON YOUR PRESENT feel less like a movie and moreso a collaborative work of art.

“Genetically much closer to maudit French literature than to mainstream American cinema, Cinqué Lee’s visually haunting 1980s post-apocalyptic narrative tone-poem should be regarded as a true underground classic!” – Jim Jarmusch

In the spirit of previous collaborations with filmmakers like Lev and Whitney, Nuotama Bodomo and James Edmonds, Spectacle invites Seattle-born filmmaker KERSTI JAN WERDAL to join us for two nights this April. The first program on April 18th is a presentation of short-to-medium-length works spanning the last ten years, culminating in the New York City premiere of her latest short, TEST PIECE; the second, on April 19 is the New York City premiere of Werdal’s feature debut LAKE FOREST PARK.

WORK 2017-25
dir. Kersti Jan Werdal, 2017-2025
80 min. In English.
United States.

FRIDAY, APRIL 18 – 7:30 PM followed by a discussion with Kersti Jan Werdal moderated by film curator Inney Prakash

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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This program of selected short films demonstrates the evolution over the past decade of Kersti Jan Werdal’s mastery of film form, her eye for composition, her historical fascinations and the interdisciplinary nature of her overall approach to cinema. WORK 2017-2025 spans documentary, reenactment, essay and dance films, culminating in the juxtaposition of 2017’s CEDAR ROSE (which forms a perfect complement with Werdal’s haunting debut feature LAKE FOREST PARK due to its use of archival material and its Pacific Northwestern locale) and her latest film TEST PIECE.

“Spending hours and hours over large stretches of time with objects, ephemera, photographs, and artworks which encompass a person’s life, I began to consider the concept of an archive, and how the elusive slippery elements of memory can be imposed upon materials and live on once the person has passed. As the archive takes shape, what’s required is a person or institution making a choice of what is kept or discarded, reflecting and informing a history which can be accurate to that history or not. I feel this is similarly tied to field-work, and the role of the anthropologist, which is impossibly problematic. Things are left out, often one or just a handful of viewpoints are reflected, and what’s left is something which many present as objective, which is in truth, inherently subjective. I feel this is also why I tend to avoid the term documentary, I’m not sure it exists, or rather – if the term holds the same meaning that it used to. I’m always considering this when making and think it’s partially why archival materials wind up in my work.” – Kersti Jan Werdal, interview with the Grand Cinema

SLOW SHAPES
2017. 12 min.

Shot in Manhattan, Brittany Bailey uses sidewalks and roadside monuments as a proxy for a stage, or dance studio. Her body creates improvised shapes utilizing the negative space between limbs, concrete, vehicles, and locals walking to where they are going.

PROMENADE
2018. 15 min.

PROMENADE is an observational portrait of dancer-choreographer Brittany Bailey, as she prepares to debut a new work at Judson Memorial Church. The film engages with archival possibility, while interrogating if or how performance, a live time based medium, may be represented in the memory of moving image.

I CANNOT NOW RECALL
2023. 15 min.

In I CANNOT NOW RECALL, Kersti Jan Werdal guides the viewer through a selection of Yvonne Rainer’s dreams, chosen by the filmmaker from a collection of Rainer’s journals archived at The Getty Museum. Constellated first through Werdal’s selections, and then refracted through the readings of a street-cast filmed in LA High Memorial Park, Rainer’s dreams appear as nodes on an anxious psychic ecosystem. As the material distills from private reflection into script into performance, what emerges is a vital interchange between desire and disquiet. References to the medium of film seem to further entangle the relationship between filmmaker and subject, as well as the relationship between film and viewer. Joined by doubles and guides, in unfinished buildings and the depths of outer space, the dreamer explores her subconscious with a probing appetite for expansion and wholeness – but who the dreamer is exactly remains an open question.

CEDAR ROSE
2017. 8 min.

“In CEDAR ROSE, Werdal’s approach provides a productive space in which a forgotten language and archive is presented as it is, without being explained or argued. Werdal allows for this dark margin of the archive, as Trond Ludemo describes it, this gap, in her bold decision of only having archival footage of the seemingly mundane language course coupled with her observational shots of the land the tribe was erased from, bearing the weight of landscape and the consequences and effects of accelerated technology and capitalism. However, Werdal does not explain this approach, and so there is a respect to the culture as it is and was through the opacity Werdal allows it in her film.” – Lucy Kerr

TEST PIECE
2025. 19 min.

Kersti Jan Werdal’s TEST PIECE dismantles cinematic conventions through a disjunctive, non-narrative layering of images, sounds, and text. From an archer in a natural landscape to a theatrical dark void where sounds are described rather than heard, and finally to a diverse collection of source texts narrated in a park, TEST PIECE constructs a dynamic and evolving cinematic space that invites viewers to critically engage with the film’s conceptual and intellectual potential. 

LAKE FOREST PARK
dir. Kersti Jan Werdal, 2021
60 mins. United States.
In English.

SATURDAY, APRIL 19 – 5 PM followed by a discussion with Kersti Jan Werdal moderated by filmmaker Lucy Kerr

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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Kersti Jan Werdal’s official synopsis for LAKE FOREST PARK is deceptively simple, calling it “a coming-of-age story about a group of friends dealing with the secret of a classmate’s death.”

Understated and enigmatic, LAKE FOREST PARK accepts the mystery of everyday life in its fragmented and observational approach. The film’s empty spaces, damp greenery and austere beauty perfectly capture the environment of the film’s Washington state locale, to say nothing of the real-life Lake Forest Park – a suburb just north of Seattle (and, crucially, the filmmaker’s hometown.)

LAKE FOREST PARK is set in the early 21st century; Werdal told an interviewer she was drawn to the era’s lack of social media, and the fact that “Escape and connection had to be accessed through other modes.” But only the closest of watchers will register that context, as Werdal’s bigger project suffuses the eternal ups and downs of the classic American adolescent experience with a palpable sense of melancholy. If not for that undercurrent of mourning – and the filmmaker’s clear fascination with human behavior, down to minute details worked out beautifully with her teenage cast – LAKE FOREST PARK would deserve serious praise as a master class in Pacific Northwestern minimalism (or so-called “slow cinema”.) Beyond that, Werdal’s film is a haunting meditation on grief, and one of the most exciting feature debuts of the decade thus far.

“With LAKE FOREST PARK, I thought of Western music, the first five minutes before the title being the epigraph and the final scene as the coda: ‘a reverberation of something already heard’…. There are certain things I gravitate towards in the edit, such as inconclusive endings, steering away from any fabricated drama, and leaning into restraint rather than spelling out what is happening or why to the audience. I’d prefer the viewer have more agency rather than dictate how they should feel. I’d like the viewer to participate, rather than sit passively.” – Kersti Jan Werdal, interview with the Grand Cinema

“LAKE FOREST PARK was photographed on 16mm film, giving it the patina of an aged object (the lovely grain patterns and warm tone here are a far cry from the flat, hard edges and cool colors of much current digital photography). Quite simply, it’s a beautiful object to look at… A very fine film from an exciting young filmmaker.” – Daniel Gorman, In Review Online

“If Gus Van Sant can be seen as an influence, this film is arguably the inverse of his PARANOID PARK, wherein a fictitious story was lent legitimacy through the application of a form of documentary realism. Here, a documentary subject is realised through a fiction film method. Closer to reinterpretation than recreation, the film becomes a fabrication responding to reality.” – Matt Turner, nonlinearities

screening with

NIGHT RUN
dir. Kersti Jan Werdal, 2023
4 mins. United States.

Memory of a night.

INNEY PRAKASH, a film curator and critic originally from Detroit, Michigan, is the founder and director of Prismatic Ground, an avant-garde film festival in New York City. His previous roles include Co-Director of Programming at Maysles Documentary Center and Curatorial Lead for the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Prakash has also contributed to festivals like Sundance and SXSW. His writings have appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Comment, and several other platforms, reflecting his deep engagement with the film community. He is presently the Film Curator at Asia Society NYC.

LUCY KERR is a filmmaker, artist, and choreographer from Texas and currently based in New York. She was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film in Filmmaker Magazine in 2022. Her debut feature film, FAMILY PORTRAIT, garnered her the Boccalino d’Oro for Best Director at Locarno Film festival, the Best Director Award from Black Canvas Film Festival, the Best Picture, Best Actress, and the Best Artistic Contribution Awards from Hainan Island International Film Festival. The film made its theatrical premiere at Metrograph after making its world premiere at Locarno Film Festival and screening at festivals including Chicago International Film Festival, El Gouna Film Festival, American Film Festival, among others. Kerr’s short films have screened at IFFRotterdam, FIDMarseille, San Sebastian International Film Festival, DocLisboa, and others.

KERSTI JAN WERDAL is a filmmaker whose work centers around collective memory, hidden cultural truths, and place. Demanding the audience take a direct role while viewing, she typically situates specific plot-points opaque, and prefers to pivot away from the expository. Her films focus on off-screen sound and framing of the subject to tell a story, while often working within a structuralist form. 

Her films have shown at IDFA, Camden International Film Festival, Prismatic Ground, Pesaro International Festival, Festival Ecrã, Blum & Poe, Galerie Allen, Anthology Film Archives, Northwest Film Forum, and Metrograph.

Werdal has also collaborated as Editor on films made by other Directors. These works have screened at MoMA, Dokufest International, Visions du Reel, Metrograph, and Ji.hlava. 

She received her BFA from Columbia University in Sociocultural Anthropology and Art History, as well as an MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts.

Presently, she is in pre-production for her next film, to be shot in Italy this Summer.

SALLY & JESS
dir. John Wintergate, 1989
United States. 94 mins.
In English.

SATURDAY, APRIL 12 – 5pm – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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Spectacle is thrilled to collaborate with our friends from Filmmuseum Boise on a rare screening of SALLY & JESS, John Wintergate’s little-seen (and Idaho-shot) followup to the infamous BOARDINGHOUSE.

A “family film” in content and production, SALLY & JESS is John Wintergate’s unreleased follow-up to BOARDINGHOUSE, his noted 1982 SOV feature. Filmed in 1989 in McCall, Idaho, the film follows the titular brother and sister (played by Wintergate’s children, Shanti and Kodey) as they navigate the fallout of their parents’ (Wintergate and his wife, Kalassu) deaths, fleeing from foster care while a child murderer operates in the area.

Less a horror film than an adventure film with some peril (a specialty of the Mouse House once upon a time) the film is at its best when it’s focused on the Wintergate family spending time together and with friends. It uses the big skies and nearby swaths of forest to make the movie feel larger than its budget. The close knit nature of the small town, pop. 2000, where it was made manifests on screen as actual community resources assemble to aid in the fictional search for the runaways.

SALLY & JESS is a snapshot of a time before the 90s boom turned “indie film” into a cottage industry where you follow every book and manual, trying your best to pass for legitimate studio product, hoping to be rise within reach of the brass ring and cash in on the promise of fame and acclaim, when making an independent movie could simply be a novelty, made for the hell of it, something you show to your friends, and then years later reminisce, “remember when they made that movie in town? What a time that was.”

“Idaho sees a lot of filmmaking among the locals, but not a lot of filmgoing. Until recently, the only repertory screenings run would be the yearly reruns of the usual franchise titles. Filmmuseum Boise (and its earlier iterations) was started to fill the void in film programming. If the only way to view a film I would see in NYC is to run it myself, then I guess that’s what I gotta do. I am very pleased to flip things around in this case and bring an Idaho film to the city.” – Alex Hansen, founder + curator of Filmmuseum Boise

2024 marked two decades since the Cannes debut of WHISKY, a drolly melancholic comedy from Uruguayan writer-director duo Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella. WHISKY combined a kind of shit-eating Beckettian existentialism with rigorously controlled filmmaking; while the movie took home an Un Certain Regard prize and was widely heralded as an important work of new Latin American cinema, Rebella sadly took his own life in 2006, at the untimely age of 32.

This spring, Spectacle is proud to host anniversary screenings of WHISKY as well as the earlier Stoll/Rebella comedy 25 WATTS (2001), and to spotlight two features Stoll made after his friend’s death. These films testify to a brilliant and idiosyncratic collaboration (and thus a great loss for cinema), as well as Stoll’s continued importance as an artist equally enamored of formal experimentation, film history, and the eternal comedy of being human.

Special thanks to Cinema Tropical, Lucía Malandro, Jesse Trussell, and Pablo Stoll.

 

25 WATTS
dir. Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, 2001
Uruguay. 93 mins.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, APRIL 8 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 19 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 22 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 25 – 7:30 PM followed by remote Q+A with Pablo Stoll
(This event is $10.) 

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Un barrio. Tres pibes. Veinticuatro horas.

Stoll and Rebella’s breakout debut details the lives (or lack thereof) of a trio of teenage friends kicking rocks over a hungover and dissatisfied 24 hours in Montevideo.

Shot in arresting, high-contrast black and white film, 25 WATTS drew inevitable comparisons with CLERKS and LA HAINE. While it is often austere, Stoll and Rebella take conspicuous pleasure in brief digressions in style, like when the camera adopts the perspective of a spinning vinyl record or an 11th-hour flashback disrupts the sleepy narrative pace. Almost a quarter century later, 25 WATTS feels like a playful, even punkish antidote to the taxidermied mise-en-scene that came to dominate twee arthouse cinema in the 2000s.

While 25 WATTS was the most recognized film in Uruguayan history at the time of its festival run, the filmmakers were uncomfortable at the idea of representing a national cinema. Nevertheless, this is a precise portrait of a culture that doesn’t know quite what to do with its young men, resulting in a turn-of-the-millennium slacker comedy par excellence (and anticipating the even more bone-dry WHISKY).

“A very charming and funny derivation of the Jarmusch manner from Uruguay… The basic focus is on three hungover slackers one busy Saturday in Montevideo. I served on the jury for the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Film that awarded its acting prize to the three likable leads (Daniel Hendler, Jorge Temponi, Alfonso Tort), and the film won many well-deserved festival prizes elsewhere (including a couple in Rotterdam.)”— Jonathan Rosenbaum

WHISKY
dir. Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, 2004
Uruguay. 94 mins.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, APRIL 10 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 17 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 22 – 7:30 PM followed by remote Q+A with Pablo Stoll
(This event is $10.)
MONDAY, APRIL 28 – 10 PM

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Stoll and Rebella did not return to the disaffected teenage milieu of 25 WATTS for their second feature, but instead pivoted into a tale of existential crisis past the point of midlife. 60-year-old Jacobo (Andrés Pazos) operates a sock factory in Montevideo. When his more successful older brother Herman (Jorge Belani) surprises him with a visit after years of estrangement, Jacobo can’t face the idea of him walking in on a life that is blatantly unsatisfying and a factory on the verge of shutting down. So Jacobo asks his employee Marta (Mirella Pascual) to pose as his wife for the weekend. A love triangle ensues.

Seen by many as the duo’s masterpiece, WHISKY is a beyond-deadpan family comedy of matters. It’s a barbed rumination on middle-class success that revels in negative emotional space. This even extends to the title, a reference to how Uruguayans say “Whisky!” the same way Americans say “Cheese!” when getting their pictures taken.

“Repeated near-Bressonian sequences track Jacobo as he opens the plant: shots of hands flipping switches and machines whirring to life establish a cinematic rhythm that propels the film through its first half… [WHISKY]’s neat bifurcation suggests a pair of filmmakers gradually becoming fascinated with larger questions of narrative structure.” — Jeff Reichert, Reverse Shot

“The story of two souls seemingly stuck in neutral (with a third in relentless drive), the film is a model of both fiscal and narrative economy, and the kind of work—gleaned from the mysteries of consciousness, telling quotidian details and a sense of aesthetic proportion—that is too often missing from American independent cinema.” — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

HIROSHIMA
dir. Pablo Stoll, 2009
Uruguay. 80 mins.
Silent with English intertitles.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 7 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 12 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 18 – 10 PM

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Like 25 WATTS, Stoll’s first solo credit as director takes place over the course of one 24-hour period. But it would be too easy to call HIROSHIMA a synthesis of that film’s slacker vibes and WHISKY’s mimetic tragicomedy, anchored by the filmmaker casting his real-life family—chiefly his brother Juan Andres Stoll as the protagonist, also named Juan. This Juan struggles to communicate with the people around him; Stoll subtracts human (and animal!) voices from the film’s equation, making HIROSHIMA a “silent musical.” The only audio is the music piped in through Juan’s discman as he makes his way from morning (working a joyless bakery gig) to night, where performing with his punk band The Genuflexes may offer an outlet.

While HIROSIHIMA does not explicitly reference Rebella’s death, its funereal atmosphere and trance state will resonate with anyone dumbstruck by grief. But Stoll’s film is also a game (and often hilarious) homage to pre-verbal cinema, using intertitles for spoken dialogue. This approach reveals a cinephilic love of experimentation wholly consistent with the earlier films, despite the almost neorealist trappings of the long takes and forlorn vistas, all building toward a payoff gag that must be seen to be believed.

“Actually nothing happens in this movie. But I was never bored throughout the screening. Makes me wonder…” — JvH48, IMDb

“…A wacky version of a certain kind of hybrid movie from cinema’s transition era from silence to sound, films in which sound was used expressively (even perversely) by the likes of Rene Clair and Alfred Hitchcock… We all see, a hundred times a week, examples of mainstream editing seamlessly, invisibly reinforcing the illusion of dialogue between characters, each of whom occupies his or her own close-up. By contrast, Stoll reminds us how dialogue was typically cut during the silent age, indistinguishable from visual force… HIROSHIMA is nothing less than trippy classicism.” — Tom Keough, The Seattle Times

THREE
dir. Pablo Stoll, 2012
Uruguay. 115 mins.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, APRIL 1 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 9 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 17 – 10 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 21 – 7:30 PM

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Another acerbic portrait of human folly and repression, THREE was expanded from a treatment Stoll and Rebella worked on together, another comic grotesquerie of family dysfunction. Humberto de Vargas stars as Rudolfo, a floundering 40-something dentist who attempts to reconnect with his alienated ex-wife Graciela (Sara Bessio) and teenage daughter Ana (Anaclara Ferreyra Palfy), who forms the film’s emotional center of gravity. Rudolfo is dissatisfied with his new marriage, Graciela is focused on her dying mother, and the void of attention from her parents leaves Ana to seek it in the wrong places.

THREE feels very much like a melancholic (and realistic) take on the quirky family dramedies that dominated the 2010s and 2020s, mostly drawn in brief, episodic scenes that gesture toward a bigger scope than is warranted by the material. The combined tension and lightness of touch that made WHISKY feel like watching bugs squirm under a microscope is here, but Stoll’s acute melancholy is impossible to miss, and the filmmaker again uses music (this time, punk and indie tracks from Uruguayan bands) to chart queasy emotional landscapes.

“This film screams ‘Uruguayan’ in so many ways, at least the stereotypes conveyed in previous films by the duo Rebella/Stoll and subsequent movies that followed their style in the Uruguayan Wave that began in the 2000’s. Being released in 2012, technologically speaking it looks like it was shot some ten years earlier: plenty of tube tv’s, white CRT monitors, VHS players, etc… A great soundtrack by local bands, usually very underappreciated in the spanish-speaking world, let alone outside of it. Loved the stylish 1990’s football jerseys from Defensor and other smaller sides from their local league and abroad.” — jaibeseret, Letterboxd