2013/ 88 MINUTES / ENGLISH AND SPANISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
A FILM BY RAYA MARTIN AND MARK PERANSON
STARRING: ALEX ROSS PERRY, GABINO RODRÍGUEZ, IAZUA LARIOS WITH THE AMICABLE PARTICIPATION OF RENÉ REDZEPI

A filmmaker (Alex Ross Perry), along with his local guide (Gabino Rodríguez), traverse the Yucatán in the days leading up to the “end of the world” with the idea of making his last movie. They look at possible locations, journeying to Chichen Itza on December 21, encountering a surrealistic gathering of New Agers and Mayan mystics. They meet a local TV reporter (Iazua Larios), who the filmmaker casts in his psychedelic Western. After the film is shot, the misunderstood and egomaniacal filmmaker decides to remain in Mexico, editing his masterpiece, forever.

An experimental, Romantic comedy that relates the end of cinema with the end of the world, LA ÚLTIMA PELÍCULA attempts to reimagine the atmosphere and the excitement of the heyday of American independent cinema, alluding to ’70s Westerns and road movies, their sense of adventure, and the experiences involved in their creation. A critical act combining fiction and documentary, it looks backwards and forwards at the same time, and creates an infinite, oneiric gesture that attempts to save cinema with one last gunshot. 

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
What is cinema? As cinema’s boundaries are, like the universe, constantly expanding, this question has become both as fundamental and redundant as say, the search for life’s meaning. But the earnest exploration of its existence extends to why we continue making films, how we make them, up until the very basic observation of the people involved in making them. When confronted by the Apocalypse, the very basis of cinema becomes as existential as life itself: its philosophy, the materiality, is questioned... In the same way that the existence of an idea in film is stretched in spatial and temporal circumstances, filmmakers at the end of time and place are gathered as forces, energies, with answers as vague and clarifying as the question posed: instead of asking if we are approaching the End of Cinema, ask rather, how would the last movie in the world look like? A question probably in the same vein as, what would you plan to do if you knew the world was going to end? What would your last meal be? What does the last movie have in common with the first?

 

Points of Renewal: On LA ÚLTIMA PELÍCULA  with Raya Martin, Mark Peranson, & Kurt Walker
- MUBI.COM

LA ÚLTIMA PELÍCULA  wins Special Jury Award João Bénard da Costa
- LISBON & ESTRORIL FILM FESTIVAL

"Mark Peranson is nothing if not a true believer in the power and the glory of movies"
- MONTREAL GAZETTE

"...gorgeous, bewildering, and playful"
- TORONTOIST

"...a mind-boggling, frequently brilliant and thoroughly hilarious film"
- NOW MAGAZINE

Memo to Distributors: Buy These 2013 Toronto International Film Festival Titles
- INDIEWIRE

"This is a 35-millimeter print," he said defiantly, "It's the only 35 millimeter print of a new film showing at this film festival."
- INDIEWIRE

"...funny , poetic, and even entertaining"
- ARTE

Podcast review of Mark Peranson and Raya Martin’s LA ÚLTIMA PELÍCULA
- THEY SHOT PICTURES — Episode #21: Festival Recaps

"... such memorable TIFF '13 gems as LA ÚLTIMA PELÍCULA,  Raya Martin's and Mark Peranson's hilariously trippy re-do of Dennis Hopper's THE LAST MOVIE and AMERICAN DREAMER"
- INDIEWIRE

"...an interesting and amusing observation of the state of today’s cinema as an expressive medium."
- NEXTPROJECTION.COM