CCA 4 Saturday 18th October
1.15-2.45 pm

Pachamama Politics
Mark Shenkin
Scotland, 2007 - 25 mins

Bolivia's 2005 presidential election marked a bad day for neo-liberalism. On the cards since late 2003, when a popular uprising succeeded in unseating the previous administration from power, the Bolivian people now turned to a man whose party, Movimiento al Socialismo, promised to reject the laissez-faire development model which, since the eariy 90s, had dominated international geopolitical agendas.

In the period following his election, Evo Morales, a former coca farmer now hailed as Latin America's first ever indigenous leader, put into effect a program of radical reform designed to lift his country out of poverty, taking control of its rich oil and gas reserves and setting in place the long process of land redistribution and constitutional reform. Filmed in Bolivia the year following the election, the documentary gives a voice to some of the people most affected by and involved in Morales' political experiment, tracing and analysing the way in which the country's indigenous majority has come together to defend his new breed of Latin American socialism.

La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (The Shining Trench of Chairman Gonzalo)
Jim Finn
USA 2007 / 60 Mins

La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo is a recreation of one day at the Canto Grande prison in Peru, following women guerrillas of the Maoist Shining Path movement from their morning marches to their bedtime chants.

Kept isolated in their own cellblocks, the guerrillas refused to acknowledge that they were imprisoned. Their cellblocks were another front in the People's War: "shining trenches of combat".

This film explores the belief systems and intense indoctrination of the brutal Latin American insurgency.