Siqueiros: Walls of Passion

A film about Mexican visual artist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) and the resurrection of his Los Angeles mural América Tropical, located at the birthplace of Los Angeles. One of the three great Mexican muralists of the 20th with Rivera and Orozco, Siqueiros was a controversy-stirring revolutionary and lifetime activist who lived with theatrical flair and painted on an epic scale. He painted murals in Mexico, the U.S., Cuba, Chile, and Argentina; he fought as a soldier in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War; and he even taught Jackson Pollock the drip technique. A Marxist, he was twice exiled from Mexico, in 1932 to Los Angeles, and in 1940 to Chile following his assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky. His masterpiece América Tropical was immediately whitewashed because of its political content, but ironically the whitewash preserved it until its re-discovery in the 1960s when it would inspire the Chicano Muralist Movement in Los Angeles. (Festival de Cine de Todos Santos y La Paz)