ZYZZYVA Holiday Movie Night with Ingrid Rojas Contreras, featuring Daniel Handler

6 p.m., Wednesday, Dec. 3
Doors at 5:30 p.m. for book sales/signing
Roxie Theater
3117 16th St., San Francisco

For the last ZYZZYVA Movie Night of the year, Ingrid Rojas Contreras presents a special screening of Aventurera (Adventuress), widely considered the greatest film in Mexico’s singular rumbera genre, introduced by award-winning author Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket). Aventurera is a film noir punctuated by Afro-Caribbean musical numbers, starring dancer-singer Ninón Sevilla as a proper young lady who, within ten minutes of the film starting, witnesses a parent’s suicide, is sold into prostitution, and transformed into a nightclub sensation. Through these hairpin turns, director Alberto Gout re-writes the rules of female portrayal in Mexican cinema through a razor-sharp indictment of bourgeois society. The screening will be followed immediately by a separately ticketed holiday party around the corner of the Roxie at 518 Valencia. Co-hosted by ZYZZYVA Editor Oscar Villalon.