Director Efraín Gutiérrez’s 1976 landmark independent feature — “Please, Don’t Bury Me Alive!” (“Por Favor, No Me Entierren Vivo!”) was the first Chicano feature film ever made — will be screened on Friday, Dec. 1, 7:30 p.m. at the UCLA Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater. The screening is part of the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s year-long 50th anniversary celebration.
The film tells the story of a young Chicano man who questions his and his people’s place in society as thousands of his fellow Latinos return from the Vietnam War in coffins. Shot in San Antonio, Texas, over a four-year period on a shoestring budget of $60,000, it grossed more than $300,000 in the first four months after it was released, outperforming the Oscar-winning “All the President’s Men” in some markets.
But both the film and filmmaker long ago dropped out of sight, prompting a quest by UCLA’s Chon Noriega, a professor of cinema and media studies and current director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC). In 1996, Noriega found Gutiérrez and the last remaining print of the film, which he deposited at the UCLA Film and Television Archive where, with support from the CSRC, the film was restored and re-released. In 2014, it was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.
Screening that same evening will be “Bless Their Little Hearts” (1984), director Billy Woodberry’s magnificent feature represents the closure and pinnacle of a neorealist strand within the “L.A. Rebellion” school of Black filmmakers. Chronicling the psychological and spiritual toll experienced by a family in the throes of economic hardship and underemployment — and seeking a dignified way to live and be happy—the film also constitutes a felicitous creative collaboration between Woodberry and screenwriter-cinematographer Charles Burnett. The film was named to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2013.
Tickets for the evening are $10 and can be purchased online here.
