Toro Negro

This award-winning film portrays the violent life of a bullfighter and, in the process, pushes the boundaries of the documentary genre. Toro Negro is an unflinching portrait of Fernando Pacheco, a self-destructive bullfighter in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula who has earned the nickname "El Suicida." Pacheco's scars are psychological as well as physical, and his violence carries over from the ring into his home life. This impressive look at the underlying causes of Pacheco's compulsive violence--intimate to the point of testing the ethics of documentary filmmaking--is not for sensitive viewers. (88 mins., video)