La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead
TRT: 50 minutes, in English and Spanish with English subtitles, Color, copyright: 1988
La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead offers a personal look at the Mexican celebration of the dead, the sacred days when the souls of the departed return to visit the living. Tracing the Days of the Dead tradition from its roots in Indian culture to its manifestations in contemporary Chicano communities, this unconventional and visually arresting documentary contemplates the loving and sometimes humorous Mexican cultural attitudes toward “that constant companion,” death.
"La Ofrenda offers the viewer (an) opportunity to confront and contemplate one's own mortality while immersing oneself in a candlelit and sun-drenched film redolent with sensuousness and joy."
- Robert Hawk, Sundance Institute
"It may well be that the biggest taboo for filmmakers today is spiritualism, for it's a quality that demands that the viewer open up to the work at a deeper level than most New York entertainment requires. Daughters of the Dust and La Ofrenda share this spirit of spiritual inquiry, and even Looking for Langston bathes its eroticism with a distinctive reverence. All of these films persist in making links to the past, in seeing the shadows of history on the present, and in opening up the surface to the depths below... These films return to the well of poetic inspiration and come to us with their buckets full. Poetry in motion, as the song used to say."
- B. Ruby Rich, The Village Voice
making La Ofrenda in El Tule, Oaxaca, Mexico
girls in cemetery during making of La Ofrenda in El Tule, Oaxaca, Mexico
family in cemetery during making of La Ofrenda in El Tule, Oaxaca, Mexico.
