Santo Domingo Blues: Los Tígueres de la Bachata (tbc)
- Run time: 1 hour 15 mins
- Language: Spanish
- Genre: Documentary
- Release date: 24th November 2005
- Starring: Luis Vargas
- Directed by: Alex Wolfe
- Official Website: http://www.santodomingoblues.com
Plot 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 colorful 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.
Guitar-playing singer songwriter Luis Vargas makes his mark in the world of Dominican Bachata music with a style all his own, “not too agitated, but not too blue either”, as he puts it. Luis takes us back to his own humble beginnings in the dusty little town of Santa Maria in the Dominican Republic, where his father still lives. Santo Domingo Blues does not use a narrator or “experts” but instead relies on musical performances, first person accounts, and character-driven scenes involving Luis and other bachateros, as these musicians are known. Bachata is genuinely a music of the people and the denizens of the bars and bodegas, the street vendors and the car service drivers, all contribute to the telling of the story