A quick note: Lady Gaga tickets go on sale Saturday. Start saving up, if you haven’t already—normal tickets run from $49.50 to $175. "Silver" and "Gold Hot Seat" packages that include a pre-show disco, live DJ and open bar, run as high as $410. Disco stick rides not included. Tickets have been selling out everywhere, so be proactive.
Serious business below this seriously amazing Lady Gaga pic.
Hot on the heels of two much–praised documentaries about Charlottesville comes a local documentary about another place entirely. I spoke yesterday with Miguel Martinez, who is codirecting a documentary along with Red Light Management’s Jamie Sisley called Farewell, Ferris Wheel. The film explores the impact of American immigration policy on the Mexican city of Tlapacoyan, Veracruz—pop. 78,000—which provides 30 percent of American circus and carnival labor.
Martinez, a former host of WTJU‘s "Danza Latina" and music video director, has been invited to show his work in progress at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival next week. He will present the work in progress as part of the festival’s All Access arm, created to "cultivate relationships between filmmakers from traditionally underrepresented communities and film industry executives."
Martinez has been working at carnivals in Northern Virginia, and regularly traveling to Tlapacoyan to shoot. "Its a town that nobody knows about," says Martinez, "so they were surprised that we made it down there." The filmmakers traveled by Greyhound with their subjects as they made the four-day trek to a carnival in Baltimore.
Miguel Martinez and Jamie Sisley. More after the pics.
The amount of available H2B visas, which allow unskilled laborers to work in the U.S. for six to nine months per year, was effectively cut in half during the recession. That has prevented some Mexican workers from returning to the seasonal jobs they’ve held since circuses started recruiting there in the 1970s. Meanwhile, 80 percent of carnival workers are foreign. "That means the carnival industry is fading away," says Martinez. "Not because people don’t go to the carnivals. It’s because American workers don’t want to work at the carnivals. Nobody wants to be a carny, you know?" Ergo, Farewell.
Martinez says that between American carnivals and the Mexican countryside, the documentary is something of a feast for the eyes. And the chance to show at Tribeca—one of the world’s major film festivals—he says, is "a little unbelievable. It’s a little surreal."
