The movie-rental chain Blockbuster is expanding its horizons -- into theatrical exhibition, of all places. The corporation has announced that next month it will open its first movie theater, a multiplex, in Cholula, Mexico. The multiplex will be called Blockbuster Cinema, but Blockbuster isn't simply licensing its brand name -- the company will operate the theater under a 10-year agreement. The new 11-screen theater will be located in a shopping center that will also include a Blockbuster rental store.

This surprises me -- it seems like the traditional theatrical model is on the way out, or will need to change drastically, and many companies are trying to find alternatives. In addition, big theater chains are trying to find other events to hold in their multiplexes these days. Of course, I'm thinking of the United States -- I don't know anything about the state of theatrical film exhibition in Mexico, and perhaps theaters are flourishing there. The Hollywood Reporter article linked above does note that Mexico has one of the most saturated markets in Latin American for movie theaters. DVD rentals may not be as easy or popular in that country. Blockbuster's biggest U.S. rental competitor, Netflix, has also branched out -- but into theatrical and DVD distribution through its Red Envelope arm, to enhance the rental business. How is a multiplex in Mexico going to help Blockbuster's primary business goals?

If you feel like you've been hearing a lot of news lately about movie distribution deals, that's because the annual American Film Market (AFM) has been going on in Santa Monica for the past week. The AFM website claims that more than $800 million in deals are made every year at the industry event. Three more distribution deals have just been announced:

• The Weinstein Company bought the U.S. distribution rights to Death Defying Acts, a feature about the life of illusionist Harry Houdini. Perhaps the recent success of The Prestige and The Illusionist inspired the deal. The film is directed by Gillian Armstrong and stars Guy Pearce as Houdini, who becomes involved with a psychic played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. One of the writers is Tony Grisoni, whose writing credits include Brothers of the Head, Tideland, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Armstrong is good at turning a biography into an interesting movie, as with My Brilliant Career, and the combination of her direction and Grisoni's writing has suddenly made me twice as interested as I would normally be in a film about Houdini. (Okay, Guy Pearce was also an influence.) TWC intends to premiere the film at Cannes in 2007.
• Palm Pictures picked up the North American rights to distribute Solo Dios Sabe (Only God Knows), a Brazilian drama that debuted at Sundance earlier this year. Palm plans to release the film in theaters in early 2007. The film stars Alice Braga (City of God) and Diego Luna (Y Tu Mama Tambien) as a Brazilian student and Mexican journalist travelling together.
• Strand Releasing acquired the North American rights to White Palms, a Hungarian movie about young gymnasts. The movie is Hungary's entry in the Academy Awards' Foreign Language Film category for 2006. Strand is apparently betting the movie will make the cut to the final Oscar nominations and subsequently garner more publicity. White Palms sounds fascinating to me, as it contrasts Eastern European and North American methods of training young athletes in gymnatics. I'm looking forward to the chance to see the film.
  

Maquilapolis codirector Vicky Funari has a limited but impressive pedigree when it comes to documenting the lives of women on the fringes of society. Her first film, Paulina, told the story of an eight-year-old Mexican girl (who, as a woman, worked as a maid to Funari and her mother in Mexico City) who was mistakenly assumed to have been raped, and the horrors she lived through as a result of that misunderstanding. Funari’s second feature, Live Nude Girls Unite! detailed the efforts of strippers in a San Francisco peep show to unionize. Both works received strong reviews despite their limited exposure, so it comes as no surprise that Maquilapolis, is as sneakily accomplished as it is.

Maquilapolis takes Funari, along with her directing partner, artist-photographer Sergio De La Torre, back to Mexico, specifically to Tijuana, where foreign factories -- mequiladoras -- are packed shoulder to shoulder, having come to take advantage of cheap labor and low taxes. The great majority of the workers in the factories are women, both because they have small, agile hands, and because they’re assumed to be more “docile” than men. Needless to say, none of the women in Maquilapolis are docile. They are “promotoras,” -- leaders -- workers who are self-selected as the ones who are willing to speak up when change is necessary. Trained in a six-week class to use digital video cameras, and about the basic principles of documentary storytelling, the subjects of Maquilapolis are instrumental in telling their own stories, whether it’s through interviews, confessions to their cameras, or by simply narrating the horrors those cameras record.

Letters from the Other Side brings up one of the perennial questions about documentary filmmaking: how much should you involve yourself in your subjects' lives, and to what extent? Should you run the risk of potentially affecting the outcome of your film, or is it more important to help people you encounter while shooting? Some filmmakers make a serious attempt not to have much effect on the stories unfolding around them, and don't employ voice-overs or let themselves be heard in their film. Others, meanwhile, are themselves a big part of their stories, the best-known example being Michael Moore. Heather Courtney, director of Letters from the Other Side, obviously decided to help—in fact, the stories in the documentary hinge on Courtney's ability to deliver video "letters" back and forth between women in small Mexican towns and their male relatives working in the United States.

Letters from the Other Side eloquently manages to present stories that show the relationship between Mexico and the U.S. and the unexpected side effects of recent American trade laws and border-tightening regulations. Courtney's documentary examines three family situations: Eugenia, whose husband left for the U.S. years ago when she was pregnant with their youngest daughter, and whose three sons have followed their dad to find work; Maria, a farmer whose two older sons crossed the border, and who is worried that as she and her husband grow old, no one will be left to work their own land; and Carmela and Laura, whose husbands died on their journey to the U.S. in a smuggling truck.

It's one of the paradoxes of human existence; things that don't really exist can have an incredible amount of meaning. Nature doesn't make national borders; people do. In Crossing Arizona, director Joseph Mathew looks at illegal immigration to America from Mexico by looking at the people and politics of one region, and the end result is a documentary that casts more light than heat on both sides of the issue, even if you can't help but wish the film had actually come up to a slightly more invigorating boil.

Mathew's careful to talk to a broad spectrum of people – policymakers and migrant workers, coroners and community activists, the border cops trying to stop illegal immigration and the 'coyotes' who lead people from Mexico to America in exchange for  money. Mathew's also not shy about exploring the cold, hard economic facts of illegal immigration. Every time you go to the grocery store for produce, a shadow-shrouded Arizona farmer explains, you're benefiting from illegal immigration. A chili-picking migrant worker explains his view of the same phenomenon: "Gringos don't want to work here. Only Mexicans work here. Gringo's don't want to work. Only in the office." He then mimes typing and laughs ruefully.

So we see the efforts of groups like No More Deaths, which places water in the desert for illegal immigrants to use so they can survive; we also see the efforts of The Minuteman Project, which creates citizen patrols to watch the border and do the job they feel the Federal Government is shirking. (The sequence built around The Minuteman Project – as a piece of regional political activism becomes a national media circus – is easily the most satisfying part of the film; you wish the rest of Crossing Arizona had the same snap.)

Crossing Arizona moves sure-footedly from air-conditioned TV studios where pundits spout blather (Bill O'Reilly speaks his praise for how well the Red Chinese have prevented illegal immigration from North Korea, and points to them as a model for the US) to the heat and dust of the desert Arizona and Sonora share, where corpses grow stiff and taut in the sun and heat that killed them. Crossing Arizona shows the audiences several corpses, and it seems gratuitous only until you recognize that these few dead are representing hundreds, thousands more. Crossing Arizona may not have the muckraking whip-crack energy of more attention-getting documentaries, but it's got a careful, graceful intelligence that finds the individual people and the big picture in a complex, real issue of concern.

Others on Crossing Arizona: Writing at Variety, Dennis Harvey described the film as "a potent plea" for a change to federal immigration policy.