Chac: Dios de la lluvia | |
---|---|
Directed by | Rolando Klein |
Written by | Rolando Klein |
Produced by | Rolando Klein |
Starring | Pablo Canche Balam Alonso Mendez Ton Sebastian Santis Pedro Tiez |
Cinematography | William B. Kaplan Álex Phillips Jr. |
Edited by | Harry Keramidas |
Music by | Victor Forzado Elisabeth Waldo |
Distributed by | Libra Films Milestone Film & Video |
Release date |
|
Running time | 95 minutes |
Countries | Mexico Panama |
Languages | Tzeltal Mayan Languages Spanish |
Chac: Dios de la lluvia, also released as Chac: the Rain God and simply Chac, is a 1975 film written and directed by Rolando Klein.
The film involves modern Maya peoples invoking the traditional rain deity Chaac.
The film is in the Maya languages. The majority of the cast speaks Tzeltal Maya, but one of the main actors, Pablo Canche Balam who plays the shaman, speaks Yucatec Maya.
Alonso Méndez Ton, who plays the cacique, was born in the city of Tenejapa, in the state of Chiapas, where he collaborated in ethnographic research. He had finished his term as mayor of Tenejapa when the movie was made.
The film is referenced in Richard Kadrey's novel Aloha From Hell where it is called Las montañas del Gehenna (a title that appears nowhere else). The narrator's plot description is basically accurate though he does incorrectly call it a "Mexican spaghetti western".
A chacmool is a form of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican sculpture depicting a reclining figure with its head facing 90 degrees from the front, supporting itself on its elbows and supporting a bowl or a disk upon its stomach. These figures possibly symbolised slain warriors carrying offerings to the gods; the bowl upon the chest was used to hold sacrificial offerings, including pulque, tamales, tortillas, tobacco, turkeys, feathers, and incense. In Aztec examples, the receptacle is a cuauhxicalli. Chacmools were often associated with sacrificial stones or thrones. The chacmool form of sculpture first appeared around the 9th century AD in the Valley of Mexico and the northern Yucatán Peninsula.
Chaac is the name of the Maya god of rain, thunder, and lightning. With his lightning axe, Chaac strikes the clouds, causing them to produce thunder and rain. Chaac corresponds to Tlaloc among the Aztecs.
Uxmal is an ancient Maya city of the classical period located in present-day Mexico. It is considered one of the most important archaeological sites of Maya culture, along with Palenque, Chichen Itza and Calakmul in Mexico, Caracol and Xunantunich in Belize, and Tikal in Guatemala. It is located in the Puuc region of the western Yucatán Peninsula, and is considered one of the Maya cities most representative of the region's dominant architectural style. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site along with the nearby ruins of Kabah, Sayil and Labna.
Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou's series of seven autobiographies focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.
The Maya are an ethnolinguistic group of indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. The ancient Maya civilization was formed by members of this group, and today's Maya are generally descended from people who lived within that historical region. Today they inhabit southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and westernmost El Salvador and Honduras.
Almost Famous is a 2000 American comedy drama film written and directed by Cameron Crowe, starring Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson, Patrick Fugit, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It tells the story of a teenage journalist, played by Fugit, writing for Rolling Stone magazine in the early 1970s, touring with the fictitious rock band Stillwater, and writing his first cover story on the band. The film is semi-autobiographical, as Crowe himself was a teenage writer for Rolling Stone.
David Russell Strathairn is an American actor. Known for his leading roles on stage and screen, he has often portrayed historical figures such as Edward R. Murrow, J. Robert Oppenheimer, William H. Seward, and John Dos Passos. He has received various accolades including an Independent Spirit Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Volpi Cup, and has been nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and four Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Hard Rain is a 1998 action thriller film directed by former cinematographer-turned director Mikael Salomon, written by Graham Yost, produced by Ian Bryce, Mark Gordon, and Gary Levinsohn, and starring Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater, Randy Quaid, Minnie Driver, and Ed Asner. An international co-production among the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, and Japan. In a small Indiana town amidst a natural disaster, a gang attempts to pull off a heist and survive man-made treachery. It received generally negative reviews and was a box office flop.
Apocalypto is a 2006 epic historical action-adventure film produced and directed by Mel Gibson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Farhad Safinia. The film features a cast of Indigenous and Mexican actors consisting of Rudy Youngblood, Raoul Trujillo, Mayra Sérbulo, Dalia Hernández, Gerardo Taracena, Jonathan Brewer, Rodolfo Palacios, Bernardo Ruiz Juarez, Ammel Rodrigo Mendoza, Ricardo Diaz Mendoza, and Israel Contreras. Set in Yucatán around the year 1517, Apocalypto portrays the hero's journey of a young man named Jaguar Paw, a late Mesoamerican hunter and his fellow tribesmen who are captured by an invading force. After a raid on their village, they are brought on a perilous journey to a Maya city for human sacrifice at a time when the Maya civilization is in decline.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe is a theatre of political satire which performs free shows in various parks in the San Francisco Bay Area and around California, founded in 1959. Despite its name, the group does not perform silent mime, but each year creates an original musical comedy that combines aspects of commedia dell'arte, melodrama, and broad farce with topical political themes. In 1987, the group was awarded the Regional Theatre Award at the 41st Tony Awards.
Godfrey MacArthur Cambridge was an American stand-up comic and actor. Alongside Bill Cosby, Dick Gregory, and Nipsey Russell, he was acclaimed by Time in 1965 as "one of the country's foremost celebrated Negro comedians."
Chac can refer to:
Hyperlink cinema is a style of filmmaking characterized by complex or multilinear narrative structures with multiple characters under one unifying theme.
Dr. Dolittle: Tail to the Chief is a 2008 American comedy film directed by Craig Shapiro and starring Kyla Pratt and Norm Macdonald. It is the fourth film in the Dr. Dolittle series. A sequel, Dr. Dolittle: Million Dollar Mutts, was released in 2009.
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is a 2009 American martial arts action film based upon the Street Fighter video game series produced by Capcom. Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak from a screenplay written by Justin Marks, the film serves as a non-canonical spin-off and theatrical tie-in to Street Fighter IV (2008). The story follows the quest of Street Fighter character Chun-Li, played by Kristin Kreuk, before the events of the original Street Fighter. The film co-stars Neal McDonough as M. Bison, Chris Klein as Charlie Nash, Michael Clarke Duncan as Balrog, and Black Eyed Peas member Taboo as Vega.
Hunac Ceel Cauich was a Maya general from Telchaquillo who conquered Chichen Itzá and founded the Cocom dynasty. While the rulers of Chichen Itzá were in part descendants of Toltec outsiders who might have been disliked for being foreign oppressors or the war a simple one of conquest, the Maya history attributes the cause of the war to the theft of a wife of a powerful ruler by a powerful lord.
Francisco Xavier Alarcón was a Chicano poet and educator. He was one of the few Chicano poets to have "gained recognition while writing mostly in Spanish" within the United States. His poems have been also translated into Irish and Swedish. He made many guest appearances at public schools so that he could help inspire and influence young people to write their own poetry especially because he felt that children are "natural poets."
Yaxkukul Municipality is a municipality in the Mexican state of Yucatán, containing 43.43 kilometres (26.99 mi) of land and located roughly 25 kilometres (16 mi) northeast of the city of Mérida. Survey maps of Yaxkukul cite its full name as "Santa Cruz de Mayo Yaxkukul".
Chac Chel is a powerful and ancient Mayan goddess of creation, destruction, childbirth, water, weaving and spinning, healing, and divining. She is half of the original Creator Couple, seen most often as the wife of Chaac, who is the pre-eminent god of lightning and rain, although she is occasionally paired with the Creator God Itzamna in the Popol Vuh, a recording of the myths of the highland Maya. This highlights her importance, as dualities such as male/female and husband/wife were extremely important to the Maya, and one cannot function without the other. Chac Chel is also called Goddess O by many Mayanists and she is the aged, grandmotherly counterpart to the young goddess of childbirth and weaving, Ix Chel. Most popular in the Late Classic and Postclassic Periods, she is most often depicted in scenes in the Dresden Codex and Madrid Codex. Depictions of her, and burial goods related to her, have also been found in Chichen Itza, the Balankanche Cave near Chichen Itza, Tulum, The Margarita Tomb in Copan, and in Yaxchilan.
Cader Edwards Davis was an American actor, producer, and playwright of vaudeville and the silent film era, known as a character actor. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he was an ordained Christian minister and first achieved prominence as a sensational orator and lecturer, becoming known as the "poet-preacher" and the "Talmage of the West", before leaving the pulpit for an acting career. He wrote and starred in several original plays and vaudeville sketches, and appeared in over 50 films. In New York he was a president of the National Vaudeville Artists Association and the Green Room Club. In Hollywood he was a founder and president of the Masonic 233 Club. He was married to several actresses, including Adele Blood, who also appeared in some of his productions.