Dollar Mambo

Institute History

  • 1994 Sundance Film Festival

Description

The locale is Panama. Or is it? When the world is a bar, film’s hard to say for sure. Until, that is, the Japanese products and U.S soldiers begin to invade. Or do they? When the film's a studio se, it’s hard to tell Maybe it's all a terrible dream, old movie, or sexy mambo.

Paul Leduc's newest film continues the musical trajectory pursued in his last two, Barroco and Latino Bar, and completes a trilogy. Once again he eschews plot for spectacle and realism for fantasy. Alternately seductive and repellent. Leduc's musical dramatization is an apt record of history. The Caribbean is present in its music, Panama in the bodies of its dancing women, and the United States in the nefarious acts of its gas masked interlopers. Clearly Leduc is up to something other than merely restaging recent events; he also wants to restage the Hollywoods in our heads, to turn musicals like On the Town inside out and expose a rotten colonial core. War becomes a musical act, a degrading chorus that even a wire-service dispatch can't explain get ready to face the music.


Tuesday Jan 25 1:40 pm
Holiday Village Cinema III

Saturday Jan 29 10:00 pm
Egyptian Theatre

$7.00

— B. Ruby Rich

Screening Details

As you use our Online Archives, please understand that the information presented from Festivals, Labs, and other activities is taken directly from official publications from each year. While this information is limited and doesn't necessarily represent the full list of participants (e.g. actors and crew), it is the list given to us by the main film/play/project contact at the time, based on the space restrictions of our publications. Each entry in the Online Archives is meant as a historical record of a particular film, play, or project at the time of its involvement with Sundance Institute. For this reason, we can only amend an entry if a name is misspelled, or if the entry does not correctly reflect the original publication. If you have questions or comments, please email [email protected]