Last night, some friends took me to Cine Vivo, a movie night in a cute room in the centre of Perth. The main feature was the documentary Chavela. All I’d heard before I entered the room was that she was a Costa-Rican born Mexican lesbian who smoked cigars. But the documentary showed her to be an innovative singer who was kind, nasty, playful, violent, seductive, ravaged by alcoholism, reduced to relying on friends for meals, who, in her seventies, became a global star, worked with Almodóvar and kept doing big concerts until shortly before her death at the age of ninety-three.
There were also two shorts: a beautiful love story between two women in a Mexican village you wouldn’t want to live in, and a biting look at what keeps people in corporate jobs they loathe.
And there was music while I bit into tasty mushroom and potato tacos. The guy who founded Cine Vivo gave a welcoming speech. There’s only one more movie in this current festival, but I’m going back!
For the Cine Vivo website, please click here.
