As the city of Quito prepares to celebrate another Good Friday, two construction workers find a dead man crucified in the courtyard of the house they are renovating. Nearby, a man in a blood-stained shirt sits in his car. His name is Antanacio, a scammer who has turned a young girl who claims to have visions of the Virgin Mary into a profitable business. But things have gotten out of hand
Eleven-year-old Lucía’s family lives a precarious life in Lake Coatepeque in El Salvador. Includes Short Film Silences of Childhood.
Humberto’s greatest desire, after his recent release from prison, is to rebuild his relationship with his estranged daughter and provide her with a decent life. But her grandparents—wealthy Evangelical pastors—are not willing to give up custody. Bullied into a corner financially and ideologically, Humberto is forced to face his own demons while simultaneously fighting a powerful ecclesiastical institution to which he once belonged. Set in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba, "The Visitor" is a somber meditation on class, family relationships, and the increasing power of Evangelism in Latin America.
After not speaking to each other in years, siblings Mateo, Belén and María José meet to sign the sale documents of their childhood home in western Uruguay. But when Mateo’s car breaks down in the middle of the night, the trio have no choice but to stay at a cozy country hotel where old disagreements and conflicts come to the surface. Includes Short Film All in Favor.
Gerardo Chijona ("Adorable Lies", "A Paradise Under the Stars") intertwines three very different stories about love, obsession and crime that converge in the end. Ricky travels back to Cuba to visit his family and his old girlfriend who has put on significant weight since he last saw her. Celina, a necrophiliac, steals a corpse who turns out to be incredibly loquacious. Claudia tries to con a drug dealer in a desperate search for money. Featuring Enrique Molina in one of his last roles for the big screen before his death two years ago.
Set in the Spanish-speaking black enclaves of Miami, Gispert’s feature debut follows Tomás, an immigrant laborer with a murky past who fled his country by shipping himself in a crate. Tomás is living off the grid, performing odd-jobs for an upper-middle class family, saving money in the hopes of eventually buying a home for his estranged family that he left behind. A series of events forces Tomás out of his solitary life to engage with people in his community in search of something lost.
Told in real time, "The Punishment" opens with two parents searching for their missing boy in a Chilean forest. Minutes earlier, Ana (Antonia Zegers) and Mateo (Néstor Cantillana) had left their 7-year-old son alone by the side of the road for misbehaving. As they look for him with the help of a local police officer, the couple will face some uncomfortable truths about their relationship and their role as parents.
Héctor returns to his village after working abroad for years to discover that it is now under the control of an evangelical preacher and that there is a lack of job opportunities. His wife despises him for having abandoned her for so long and his young child doesn’t recognize him. Héctor has become an outcast. He decides to reclaim his life even if it means burning down anything or anyone tied to his past.
Grumpy 60-year-old José has led an apparently happy life with his wife Elena. José can’t bear living without her after she unexpectedly dies of a heart attack during his birthday celebration. But when he finds Elena’s diaries where she writes about her dalliances with three different lovers, José decides to confront all three in an attempt to make sense of his relationship with Elena.
Confined to his Tahitian hut by the French colonial authorities in 1903, the painter Paul Gauguin is forced to paint a new masterpiece to save his five-year-old native son, while battling illness and torn between madness and sanity. In the course of these events, memories of the past, especially of his life and work at the Panama Canal, the place where his artistic career began and his guilt at abandoning his family in Paris, begin to haunt him.
The first Puerto Rican-produced film to premiere at Sundance, Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist Marrero Sánchez’s feature debut follows ailing artist Noelia who, after learning that her cancer has metastasized, leaves her partner behind in San Juan and moves in with her mother on the island municipality of Vieques. She keeps secret her condition so she can live life on her own terms, including joining in the efforts to document the toxic legacy of the U.S. military exercises in the island.