True/False Films

Circo

In person: director Aaron Schock

Sneak preview. For generations, the Ponce family has journeyed throughout rural Mexico with its traveling circus to provide strangers with a spectacle. Seniors and toddlers alike take part, but the heart of the operation is Tino, who tirelessly labors not only to keep the whole venture afloat but also to minimize tensions between his father, the owner, and his wife, Ivonne, who grows tired of the nomadic lifestyle. "Through the good and the bad — in the circus forever," Tino pledges at one point. By film's end, however, director Aaron Schock's lens has so acutely captured the distance between Tito's romantic perception and the gritty reality of the circus that his promise has begun to resemble a curse. The result sympathetically captures the allure of a way of life growing rapidly obsolete. Plays with Monkey Business #3 (dir. Matthew Killip; 3 min.). (KP)

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