Land, Rain and Fire: Report from Oaxaca

Tami Gold and Gerardo Renique's documentary examines the June 2006 teachers' strike in Mexico's poverty-stricken state of Oaxaca, a protest that devolved from a peaceful demonstration for better wages and benefits into a bloodbath when local police opened fire on the teachers and their supporters. Although horrific, the police action failed to break the spirit of the strikers, who grew emboldened and added newer demands to their protests, including asking for the resignation of Oaxaca's Governor Ulises Ruiz. Local farmers and average citizens joined the fracas, and at one point a brigade of housewives took over the state-run radio network to offer their voice to the brouhaha. Land, Rain and Fire combines on-location video footage with after-the-fact interviews of protestors to piece together the chaotic, violent story (in which state and federal police and paramilitary units attacked and kidnapped protestors), but at 30 minutes the film feels rushed and compressed (it points a hasty finger at a NAFTA-induced collapse of the local economy, which doesn't explain why the teachers would be striking for increased pay) and only presents one side of the story (Governor Ruiz is nowhere to be seen here, except in effigies carried in the protest marches). Definitely effective as agitprop against Mexican political corruption, the film's value as an impartial documentary is somewhat more dubious. Optional. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)