Friday 29 July 2005, 19.00

Dana Rotberg, Mexico 1991, 90’, subs

‘Shot on a shoestring, Angel of Fire has the power of folk-art iconography as well as its frequent fatalism.’ (Dennis Harvey, San Francisco Bay Guardian)

Alma is a thirteen year-old fire-eater and trapeze artist whose life centres around the creaking, surreal, fantastical world of the circus. Her only joy is love for her father, an elderly clown who impregnates her with a son before dying. Rejected as an outcast by the circus, she wanders the streets as an itinerant before falling in with the members of a marionette theatre group. Slowly she perceives that this group may offer a ray of hope amidst the squalour of her life. But first she must undergo a demanding purification ritual to cleanse her of the great sin she has committed. Rotberg casts a powerful aura over her material as she follows Alma’s odyssey through the vagaries of life, rejected and embraced, but never fully in control of her destiny.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£4, booking recommended

    

This event is related to the Frida Kahlo exhibition