Reviews
"In the guise of a documentary, comparative study of Mexican and Chicano celebrations in remembrance of the dead on the first and second of November each year, La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1988) is itself both an offering (ofrenda) and a subversive communicative act.
Whereas previous documentary collaboration between filmmakers Lourdes Portillo and Susana Munoz, Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (1985), had focused on the resistance of a group of women to State terror in Munoz's native Argentina, La Ofrenda, explores Portillo's cultural heritage: a Mexico of childhood memory and today's Mission District, the Chicano and Latino barrio of San Francisco, California. The script however, purposefully denies biography as an organizing principle of the film by creating an anonymous voiceover commentary. The alternation of two nameless narrators, one male, one female, serves to stress historical and cultural continuity, in counterpart to the community events presented in the film.
Foregrounding its gendered narration, the film specifically "speaks to" the Latino community, to all women and men who, like Portillo, have journeyed are some time from Latin America to the United States or who live simultaneously in both cultures. The film also addresses children, the progeny of patriarchal and matriarchal narrative voices, thus affirming Latino culture and history within the contemporary multicultural society of the United States and contemplating a future diverse society in which there would be hopefully no racism.
Finally, imitating the playful Mexican and Chicano relation to death which the film considers a socially "healthy" intimacy with mortality and humility, La Ofrenda playfully mocks its viewers, giving all of us, whatever our heritage, "a little push" toward a radical transformation of social relations, toward a better life for the entire community through a different conceptualization of temporality and subjectivity."
"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."
"...A nontraditional look at (the tradition of the "day of the dead") in a film saturated with color and life. Stunning to the eye, this exploration of a true phenomenon evokes the loving, sometimes-humorous nature of Mexican attitudes toward 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."
