Miami Dispatch.

The Miami International Film Festival went into the home stretch this past week with its selection of Latin American cinema, just as George W Bush toured Latin America with the message that his administration cares about the poor of that region. No surprise that his nemesis, Hugo Chavez, took to the airwaves to mock the man who cut the taxes of the very wealthy and sent the children of the poor to fight his war in Iraq.

Update, 3/12.

In Satanás, which saw its world premiere at the MIFF, Andres Baiz builds a drama around the kind of mass killing that you usually read about happening in America. An English tutor, solitary and single, loses his temper and ends up shooting his mother and the patrons of a restaurant. He then heads over to the home of his prize pupil, where he kills the young student and her mother - the revenge of the indignant inconspicuous man. All this actually happened in Bogota some years ago - in fact, the man actually killed more people than in the film - and Baiz, a NYU graduate, made his first feature as an adaptation of a non-fiction study of the case. I was particularly interested in the film as an opportunity to see what can still shock Colombians today (besides a visit from Bush, which seems to be truly shocking, if the TV coverage from Bogota is any indication.) After all, this is the country with what is said to be the world's highest murder rate and all too regular brutality in the drug trade and a long insurgency that has taken many thousands of lives. Oddly, there are no drugs here, no political alignments, just stories that could easily happen anywhere.

Baiz interweaves the story of the priggish murderer Eliseo (played by the Mexican actor Damián Alcázar) into other subplots. One involves a young girl who escapes life as a peddler in the market by signing on as a flirt who drugs men in bars so her bosses can rob them. She gives up the job after she's raped by a taxi driver and his mechanic friend, in another scene that's meant to shock. I'll have to ask the director why we don't see the scene in which the two rapists are murdered in revenge. Another story line follows a priest who loses his struggle to stay chaste, with his young servant. Believe it or not, she's a girl. Bear in mind that this is the director's first feature. Let's just say that Baiz has a long way to go before he gets to Hollywood, which he says is a goal.

One film that I particularly liked was Fish Dreams a story set in Brazil by a Russian director, Kirill Mikhanovsky, who lives in the US. Once again, it's trouble in paradise, if you're foolish enough to call it that. In a town where men fish from their boats for lobsters that bring nickels and dimes, and no one seems to have a real job, young Jusce barely makes a living. He has eyes for the pretty Ana, who tends to her child and lives with the rest of her family, mostly in front of the soap operas that air endlessly on the TV set. The television works, but that's about all that does in this backwater, where fisherman are told that hunting for lobster will be banned for environmental reasons. Ana's an old friend of Jusce's, but the romance doesn't fire up until another old friend and rival arrives from the city with a jeep - great girl-bait in this tiny town - and eventually Jusce and Ana find their own odd escape.

Mikhanovsky has an eye for the blend of beauty and hardship on the Brazilian coast, and for the nuances of his characters, who look great in close-ups. Let's hope that Fish Dreams gets some attention.

One film that's already gotten some attention is Paraguayan Hammock, by Paz Encina, which premiered at Cannes last spring. I was warned away from this film by people who told me that it was nothing more than a single shot of two elderly farmers in a hammock in what looks like a clearing in a forest, with a voice-over in the indigenous Guarani language in which they speak of their son who has left for war. Obviously, the film is much more than that - a meditation on time, memory, hope and disillusion. As the film has made its way through the major festivals, critics have tended to see it as a metaphor for Paraguay, the poor landlocked country that is waiting for its destiny, which is denied. It's also about ordinary people (who could be from any country) being asked to give up their first-born for a distant war. Paz Encina has done something remarkable here, making a film about characters waiting for rain in a drought whose lives don't conform to the impatience of today's film storytelling. Of course, people accustomed to the boiler-plate approach to filmmaking won't find this familiar.

Another triumph in Miami was El Violin, which I saw in the Dominican Republic in November. Read what I wrote about it then here.

Brazilians seem proud of the understated Drained by Heitor Dhalia, which won the top prize at Sao Paolo. It's the closest thing to a Czech film that I've seen outside the Czech Republi. An unassuming pawnbroker (with all sorts of sexual demons inside) takes frequent breaks from entertaining odd clients at his business to stare at the perfect derriere of a waitress in a café down the block. All the while, a foul smell wafts through his office, and there's a Kafka-esque determination that our poor hero is responsible for it. His engagement to a plain girl collapses as the waitress's body becomes the sole preoccupation for this man who has seen everything come into his pawnshop. Watching him watch the waitress from behind, you can't help but think of Jan Svankmajer (whose surrealism is never equaled by Drained), or of the silly strain of Czech films epitomized by I Served the King of England by Jirí Menzel, which played at Berlin this year. Like the gentle obsessions of magic realism-lite, this one's effect will blow away as soon as the credits roll.

Latin America these days includes much of the United States - not just Miami, but also New York, which is where the independent film Choking Man [site] is set. It's not Manhattan, but Jamaica, Queens, or someplace near there, a location in the borough where many immigrants to the city tend to live, and tend to be invisible to the New York Times unless their house burns down. Most of the action in Steve Barron's film takes place at the Olympic Diner, where Amy (Eugenia Yuan), a new Chinese waitress, meets painfully shy Jorge (Octavio Gómez), a dishwasher from Ecuador. They don't fall in love, which is the only thing that's not predictable in this film which was well-received at its Tribeca premiere last year. Jorge, who can barely say his own name, is taunted by his co-workers in the kitchen and by his roommate. Kitchen workers spill out their anxieties or just perform for attention. In Sundance-style quirkiness, customers are strange enough to give the place a dreamy quality. Yet when a man chokes on his food, Jorge is there. That said, the film is elegantly shot by Antoine Vivas Denisov. See it just for that.

Update, 3/12: At indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez reports on the award-winners and the new festival director.

Posted by dwhudson at March 11, 2007 11:15 PM