Nuevo mundo

It is a film which has been banned from viewing for many years, due to its controversial and unorthodox presentation of the early history of the catholic and Spanish rule over what is now Mexico. It presents how the catholic monks and priests were utterly frustrated in the late 16th century in their attempts to convert the local people. The local folk only prayed to statues of Madonna and Jesus if they had little statues of pagan deities placed below them or if it was allowed to consider Jesus and Mary as simply one more deity. So a priest came up with a plan to paint a madonna which looked like one of the locals and then have local persons go around and claim they witnessed a "miracle" that was a vision of that Madonna. The priest wanted the local population to come to accept a Christian Mary as one of their own and thus crack the pagan hold. He succeeded and had the locals involved in the plot murdered. He is later on murdered himself by the Church, as he was too dangerous for them now. The similarity to the Guadalupe "miracle" in Mexico is blatant and it was the reason the film was shelved for a long time. Apart from this story, the film portrays catholics and Spanish as mean, cruel and cynical and has one of the local characters ask "Why should the local people be afraid of your hell if they are already in one, enslaved, tortured and raped?"