Santo Domingo Blues: Los Tigueres de la Bachata
73min/Full Color/Spanish with Subtitles

Director/Producer/Editor: Alex Wolfe

Produced by: Mambo Media

Synopsis: Santo Domingo Blues is a feature-length documentary that tells the story of the guitar-playing, singer songwriter Luis Vargas and Bachata, the guitar blues of Santo Domingo.

Born in the bars and brothels of the Dominican Republic, Bachata is now eclipsing rap as the music of choice for Latino youth on the streets of New York and has become an emblem of national pride for Dominican immigrants.

This movie documents why Bachata, known originally as the “Song Of Bitterness”, was, and still is, so important to the waves of impoverished immigrants that pour into American cities from the Dominican Republic. It was the anthem of the hard drinking, womanizing, down on his luck man, vilified as the entertainment of the brothels, but worshipped by the poor as their authentic music.

Today Bachata is heard on the radio throughout the Americas from New York to Buenos Aires and rivals Merengue and Salsa as the preferred music of the Latin American world.

With exclusive interviews with stars and pioneers of the genre and scenes involving live performances on and off stage, Santo Domingo Blues brings to life the triumph of a poor people’s music over censorship and prejudice.

Director Biography: Alex has made a number of award-winning documentary and narrative works. Recent television pieces on Latin music include the Emmy-nominated Keeping the Beat, Puerto Rican Soul, Trovador, and Bachatero!, all for WNET television in New York. His short films Crackerjack, The Mule, and Precious have shown at many film festivals internationally, including Rotterdam, Cannes (Kodak Prize Showcase), Vienna, Chicago, Sao Paulo, Havana, Hamburg and Melbourne. They have been broadcast on PBS in the U.S., Canal Plus in France, Channel Four in Britain, ZDF in Germany, ORF in Austria and SBS Television in Australia. His work has been awarded the Kodak prize, the grand prize of the Long Island Film Festival, the Mikeldi Prize for Fiction at the Bilbao Film Festival, and the Tisch award for excellence in screenwriting. He also recently completed Nimbus, a short film portraying the poetry of a tropical storm in the rain forest. Wolfe worked as a Criminal Defense Investigator in San Francisco and on the California-Mexico border in the mid-eighties. He received a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley and an MFA in Film and Television from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Alex grew up in the mountains of Central Puerto Rico and has worked extensively in Latin America.

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