A Place Called Chiapas

Canadian filmmaker Nettie Wild wears her biases on her sleeve. Providing her own voiceover narration of her five-month expedition to the troubled southern Mexican state of Chiapas, she sometimes comes off as a First World romantic revolutionary voyeur. "In Canada, we debated the North American Free Trade Agreement -- in Mexico they went to war over it." And she jacks up the drama with a spooky, evocative soundtrack score and theatrical editing. Sometimes she seems gullible, sometimes merely unclear (the complicated issues get a cursory explanation). But she's brave and relentless, and revealing in spite of herself. The romance of black-ski-masked armed revolutionaries on horseback and their mysterious city-bred leader, Marcos, gives way to the everyday realities of an impoverished Mayan Indian population living in near-ungovernable chaos, and the contending forces of Zapatistas, the paramilitary right-wing Peace and Justice group, and federal troops. The film is exquisitely shot and edited, and in the end you come to trust both the tale and the teller.

-- Jon Garelick