Spine 686: Redes

We continue through the World Cinema Project Vol 1 boxset with a 1936 film from Mexico, though with a rather international production crew, that presages Italian neorealism probably. Redes is among the more openly Marxist films the Criterion Collection has shown us, though I have a feeling that's going to be true for a lot of what we see from the World Cinema Project. It began life as a documentary about a fishing community near Veracruz sponsored by Mexico's Secretariat of Public Education, but collaborators Fred Zinnemann (co-directing), Emilio Gómez Muriel (co-directing), Paul Strand (cinematography), the non-professional cast performing their daily lives, and a myriad of others behind and in front of the camera grew it into a semi-documentary tale organizing against the oppression of capitalism.